> special arcane magic It doesn't really do anything particularly arcane (unless you count EBCDIC conversions) but it does things that are useful and often nec

> special arcane magic It doesn't really do anything particularly arcane (unless you count EBCDIC conversions) but it does things that are useful and often necessary that other equally-standard utilities can't. Isn't that good enough? > Doing this kind of thing is a) rare Probably not as rare as you think. Maybe it's not all that useful for writing applications, but for the quite large number of people who have to do provisioning (either bare-metal or virtual) and such it's a different matter. There's a lot to be said for tools that are ubiquitous, well standardized, and flexible.