OK, new angle, I'm a system admin, but due to the support of the backup infrastructure, (Veritas Netbackup, isolated backup network, and roughly 150 client systems and about 60 tape drives) I find myself writing scripts that take a fair amount of engineering to keep the environment sane, I'm not talking about millions of lines of code, but between the dozen or so systems that handle the tape drives, there's an awful lot of potential for "one offs" and writing the code to keep all the potential future changes from making the environment unsupportable is enough to keep you busy thinking about how to solve a problem that will be dropped onto 3 different unices. my $.02 On Sat, 22 Jun 2002, Ben Neigebauer wrote: > I would have to say Software engineers are often a systems administrator, > but systems administrators are very seldom a Software Engineer. > > Sorry, writing a little script is considered programming, not Software > Engineering. > > One you start pushing millions of lines of code, you will understand. Its > all in the planning and design, hence the Engineering. > > > -- LINUX, because rebooting is for adding hardware! www.linuxsnob.com <-- a little linux humor, and a very little support.