[itomato]

This is a simple UNIX pipeline, not multi-hundred line spaghetti of korn, c, bash or even zsh shell scripts.

No builtins were used in the example, just core utilities deployed the way they were designed.

Rewriting the wheel is completely bogus, doubly so when you ultimately make calls to those utilities, as is common when 'admins-cum-programmers' start getting their hands dirty with Python.

[gkop]

I am generally in favor of the idea of the OP, but the core utilities do differ across environments and this will bite you sooner or later.

I was bit recently by some pretty boring search and replace functionality differing between sed on OSX and on Debian. Like, I would have had to pass a different argument to sed based on the version of sed (So I switched to Perl for the task). But this is certainly an insidious category of bug where you don't discover it until to try to run the script in another environment and then you're potentially stuck debugging the script from the top down.

[csours]

If you need something that is only used once or for a short time, in one place, script away!

I'm actually strongly in favor of scripts; but the web is eating everything. If it has to scale, put it on the web.