you might as well ask for a listing of their home directory. I think most programmers write house-keeping tools when they're new to a platform (or even a given

you might as well ask for a listing of their home directory. I think most programmers write house-keeping tools when they're new to a platform (or even a given box.) once you have your environment well tailored and you're comfortable with it, you forget you even wrote tools. log parsin and transformation is basically the essence of automated system administration. if you ever had a root account in a unix box you must have written at least ONE log transformer and messaging tool of some kind. OTOH, people working on REAL engineering problems using excellent tools on posh platforms will not need to write auxillary tools. How many log analyzers does a DSP engineer need to write? just an example :-)