But why should shell scripts be treated differently from other programs in my path? To me it's precisely that I don't know and don't have to know how a program works, how it's implemented, etc. that I find interesting about a unix environment. For some reason discriminating against shell scripts being interactive or deleting files (One can't argue te user doesn't know, he has to consciously call the script and give it valid input), seems arbitrary.

And regarding your script, I remember doing something lile that before I had this script, but I didn't always want to delete the first file it found, but I had to manually scan the output and run rm for those files I wanted to delete. Saying that writing a script that helps me automate the process by glueing the steps together is bad style (especially if I know that it's output is never parsed nor has to be parsed by other programs), seems wierd.