This is just a note introducing myself to the list, and
explaining what I hope to get from the list.

I'm a software systems engineer at Georgia State University.
That basically translates to Unix Systems Administrator, though
my specialty is programming systems utilities.  We run Solaris.

Most of my scripts are written in perl, I have one pretty large
scale project I wrote and maintain in php, and for the forseeable
future I'll probably still be primarily working in perl (most of
the people in our group know at least a little perl, so if I'm
not available the code is not inaccessable to my workgroup).

About a year ago I began looking at ruby, really liked it.  It seemed
clean, easy to read, and had all the usual capabilities which attracted
me to perl to begin with.  I didn't pursue it at the time because perl 
was adequate for my needs.  About two weeks ago I started dabbling in ruby
again, and have decided to write those utilities not likely to be 
maintained by anyone else (in other words scripts for my own use)
in ruby so I'll get a more rounded experience in the language.

The typical script I'll be writing is the usual administrators utility
where one opens a file (including program output in that category) loops
through the file a line at a time doing regex matches, and does appropriate
stuff based on those matches.

I look forward to browsing this list and asking questions from time to
time.  ruby strikes me as a very good scripting language.

Larry