For the n+1st time in my career, I've snuck Perl into a non-Perl project by writing a script that scans the code base looking for certain patterns. This time around I'm looking for "@todo" and "FIX" markers in the code (we haven't standardized on a way of recording "this needs attention"), and for property names in code that don't have corresponding entries in the properties files (something otherwise detectable only at runtime).
Eventually, this will grow to give us incremental counts of files and lines, so that we can chart "growth" in the codebase (for our own curiousity). I'll probably have to add a "does each file contain the correct copyright/disclaimer" at some point.
In projects past, people have found the results of these scripts so handy that any objection to Perl is quickly overcome.
