I'm just a few years down the road from you and work in the type of environment you are describing. Even though my focus has been ASP and .NET, I have been fortunate enough to maintain one critical Perl script over the last three years. The script was recently retired, and I came to the monks to get ideas for other things I can do with Perl, even though I'm in an MS shop. They provided some great advice in Last Script. What now? that you might find useful