I've had to make the move into Unix over the last few months and I see now that I absolutely have to learn more about Perl. I took a short course in it last fall, but it wasn't enough.

I recently had to do some reporting from a very, very kludgy Windows-based program that sits on an Oracle database run in Unix. This program does it's printing through Unix and the results are just awful. Well, I wrote scripts for each type of printer using perl's text handling abilities and before long, I had some rather nice printer drivers. I'm still working on a few things, but the essential stuff works and is in production now. Font and font size, lines per inch and other printer settings can be adjusted on the fly from command line parameters. I wish I had had Perl back when I suffered with DOS-based reports way back when.