Thank you for what sounds like good advice. Advice won from hard experience is what I'm looking for.

My one-off scripts are using a lot of cut and paste reuse, which from what you are saying, is not necessarily a bad thing at this point. I was concerned.

I have to agree that logging is very important. I'll take great care here to log everything and rotate the logs. I'm already doing this on a non-Perl application I support and I have to say that I've never regretted it. I even compress the old logs and more than once have been asked to research something that happened weeks ago and was happy I had them.

From what you describe, you'll be working alone - this is a bad idea. You need someone to discuss your thoughts with, and your boss will also need somebody to take your place when the bus runs you over. A lot of bad design ideas get killed by explaining them to somebody else.

Unfortunately, this will be a given. I can bounce some ideas off of some other programmers here, but they won't have very much experience in Perl or the areas that I'm working in. I may be making heavy use of the Monastary!