I come from a UNIX background, having hated it at first (as I find many 
people do) and then when I saw all of the power that was there,
unavailable in DOS (my earlier roots), I find myself excited about all
of the possible ways to accomplish a task.

Some scripts I have written in UNIX still cannot be performed in 
DOS/Winblows 95, or  would take a considerable time to code. I had started 
with AWK, Korn shell, Perl and had always avoided sed for some reason; 
perhaps thinking it too cryptic or difficult to master. However, I started 
last year really delving into it and forcing myself to use it a lot. It 
seemed readily suited to perform a *lot* of tasks in a small amount of code.

Although I do not use it for everything (shame on you!), I sometimes find it 
the only (quick) solution to a problem. I do not possess the skill and/or 
depth of others, such as the esteemed Greg Ubben, whose scripts are only 
outdone by his ability to explain them in such an understandable way that 
they can be modified/altered to one's own particular problem at hand.

I am usually involved in a large amount of work (and usually 3 days late) 
and cannot participate in the list as much as I would want to, I do, 
however,  find the postings very informative and enlightening.

Well, that's all for me.
Jeff Smith