Although it is best known as a language for web application development, Ruby is a great general-purpose scripting language. It has become my go-to language for the kinds of throw-away scripts that come up from time to time. I enjoy writing code in Ruby, so it makes sense for me to turn to that same language to get some of this busy-work done.  In this talk, we will walk through some real-life problems, looking at how some basic Ruby code can be used to solve them. Along the way, we’ll cover file and directory manipulation, log parsing, regular expressions, and the basics of building command-line tools in Ruby. We’ll also look at the process of building such scripts iteratively using the tools Ruby provides.