automating administrative tasks in Cyrus 2.1.15

[Patrick Goetz]

Sorry if this is a stupid question, I'm relatively new to cyrus as an
administrator and have made an effort to RTFM.

I'm wondering if there is any way to automate administrative tasks in
Cyrus?  I ask because I recently inherited the job of administering a
debian Cyrus 2.1.15 system at the same time that the system crashed and
the contents of /var/lib/cyrus were lost.  It was a major chore to
recreate each top level mailbox and then run

   reconstruct -r user.a_user

for each individual user.  The O'Reilly Managing IMAP book talks about
using `cyradm connect` with TCL scripts, but this seems not to be an
option with the new Perl version of cyradm, and I have been unable to
identify any replacement system.

It seems has if automating Cyrus Administration tasks has simply dropped
off the face of the planet; sort of like a taboo thing that no one dares
talk about -- certainly I haven't been able to find anything.

Even being able to do a

  reconstruct -m

would have been a big help, but the man page simple admonishes "NOTE:
CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE" and leaves it at that.

Am I missing something?  Is google no longer my friend?