Well there's quite a few configure file formats in the world. Some are keypairs, some are hierarchical, there's the popular .ini format, and many others of cou

Well there's quite a few configure file formats in the world. Some are keypairs, some are hierarchical, there's the popular .ini format, and many others of course. So say you don't really care what's in /etc/ssh/sshd_config, but want to make sure it doesn't have passwords enabled. With puppet you could: augeas { sshd_config: context => "/files/etc/ssh/sshd_config", changes => [ "set PasswordAuthentication no"], notify => Service[ssh] } So basically augeas provides set, unset, match, remove, append, and related functionality for pretty much all configuration types. Then you just each whatever tool you are using (like puppet) about augeas and you suddenly can easily manage 100s of file types.