The point of my post was that I obviously need to revisit and perhaps redesign my scripts and I wanted to see if any best practices were documented for this common pattern. Thus, there was no code or logging results given.

I'd like to think I'm a reasonable, perhaps even decent debugger... maybe a decent coder with more than 15 years experience. Unfortunately, most of that was as a consultant stuck in situations where I only learned enough of anything well enough to bodge together what I needed to integrate for that customer that week or month.

Where I'm having an issue is that when I try too embace a technology, most of the materials available is about 1 + 1 = 2, when I already know that, albiet in another language, and I really want to learn calculus. So, I go about reinventing calculus... poorly. For example, perl cron scripts digesting logs and spewing reports have been around 30+ years and perl has been around for almost 20, this pattern should be well documented.

Another example is using JDBC in JSP. I can find ten billion examples of how to do a basic query, but thats not the "correct" way to do things anymore. you're supposed to put the business logic and query code in beans and the presentation layer in the JSP page. Can I find any design patterns or tutorials on this? No, not unless I what to spend 500 pages learning a product like Struts.

Anyhow, Chiano, I didn't mean to vent at you and don't think you deserved it... it just happened :). Thanks everyone for your input, you've given me a lot of ideas and I have a few of my own... I'll keep you posted.

Thanks, :)

Jimbus

PS: I should have said I'm filling up /home. I'd thought /home was an alias for /usr/home like in freebsd, but I was mistaken