> You're going to have to invest the time to do it right up front This is the problem with most places I have worked: "I want this and I need it today." Script

> You're going to have to invest the time to do it right up front This is the problem with most places I have worked: "I want this and I need it today." Scripting is the obvious answer. Then it will change to "I want it to run every day" and even if I say "it needs more work" the response will be "well, it's working now, so why do you need to fix it?" And so a shell script or several go into production and I can't stop it. In any case, even if you use something more formal, you can still write fragile, error-prone code. Bash or Perl is not the problem - you can do great work with those tools, if you have time.