Scripting is good

So just how many of you guys who actually work in the computer network security field have a good handle on scripting? Whether that be PERL, or Python doesn’t matter really. It is pretty much a key ability to have. There is nothing worse then doing monotonous, redundant, and boring stuff. It has to be done, but really a monkey could do it. Problem is, there is only you to do it. That is where the scripting comes in. For example, what about the massive amount of data that your firewall or IDS generates? You may have a frontend for them, but does it display what you want? Often for me it does not. Back to scripting and the need to know it once again. You don’t have to be a master at it as long as you can do what you need. Building good, and effective regex’s though is a seriously irritating task! Seeing that the script won’t work, and trying to find the breakpoint in the regex can be a most onerous task. Bleh. Anyhow enough about that. Do any of you have some thoughts?