  I review our recent results concerning the metal abundances in quasar
absorption-line spectra obtained with the UVES/VLT, HIRES/ KECK, and STIS/HST
spectrographs. The analysis is based on the Monte Carlo inversion procedure
aimed at the restoring the physical parameters and the 1D distributions of the
velocity and density fields in quasar absorbers. A functional dependence of the
line-of-sight velocity dispersion, sigma_v, on the absorber linear size, L, was
found which may indicate that the metal absorbers are associated with
virialized systems like galaxies or their halos. A metal content enhancement
(up to Z = 4Z_solar) was observed in small-size absorbers (L < 0.4 kpc),
whereas decreasing metal abundances were found in systems with increasing L.The
lowest metallicity ([C/H] = -3.0) was detected in the z = 2.917 Lymna-limit
system (LLS) with N(HI) = 3.2 10^{17} cm^{-2} and L = 140 kpc. The relative
abundance ratio of [Si/C] = 0.35, measured in this LLS, seems to indicate that
the initial mass function for the stellar population, produced the observed
metallicity pattern, was constrained to intermediate masses, M_up < 25M_solar.
