As you learnt scripting on your own, it's rather good, so kuddos for that!
Over the years, I've written a bunch of scripts, and still use a most of them on a day to day basis, either interactively, in pipes or through cronjobs.

Here are a few tips I can give you, based on my experience:

0. Think small. Scripts are supposed to glue programs together, not be programs on their own. Think your ouptut to be useful to other programs.
1. Be quiet. Logging looks cool, especially with "...." and green "OK" or red "FAIL", but they definitely don't help in pipelines.
2. Avoid using 'rm' in shell scripts. I tend to make my script be selectors or filters, so that I can inspect the output beforhand, and append "xargs rm" after that.
3. Avoid interactivity. The best tools are the one that are automated and can "think" on their own.

Note that these tipa are totally subjective, it's based on my own experience, so it might differ for other people.

Now, I know that these are rather abstract, so here is an attemot at doing the same, "my way" ;) (written directly from memory, without testing of course :P)


This basically only transfom the input, and let the filesystem untouched, so even if the script is messed up, I cannot delete any file, loose data or corrupt it (because I know how bad I can be at coding :P)

Anyway, keep scripting!

EDIT: OMG, it works!