To be honest, I know exactly how it can get rusty. For a little background, I'm a sysadmin at a large healthcare company. I'm no slouch when it comes to scrip

To be honest, I know exactly how it can get rusty. For a little background, I'm a sysadmin at a large healthcare company. I'm no slouch when it comes to scripting. I've written my own automation scripts that use Perl:DBI and a MySQL back-end to automate most of my daily functions. I know how to create a database schema from scratch, populate the tables, and generate CRUD apps from them. Still, even getting that deep into it, there are 1 or 2 month stretches of time where I do no scripting at all. I might be deploying a 100TB SAN somewhere, building Oracle database clusters (using automation scripts I wrote months ago in cfengine), doing firmware updates, fixing network issues, helping VMware admins figure out their boxes, etc. The problem with a sysadmin's life in general is that there is way too much stuff to do to focus on scripting or coding 8 hours a day. Some of us love that stuff, but when you've got a brand new SAN, blade chassis, or servers to deploy, they don't just deploy themselves. There are probably only a few shops that actually embrace the sysadmin coder, or devops as I've heard it called. Your point about ad-hoc scripts is well taken. I use one-liners on a daily basis, even for general computing tasks like renaming files, or to manipulate data using awk or sed. This is not what I would call real scripting, but it does require a fundamental understanding of the tools.