I actually had something similar myself, a shell function called findRE, the entire purpose of which was to automate searching a given path recursively for a gi

I actually had something similar myself, a shell function called findRE, the entire purpose of which was to automate searching a given path recursively for a given regex. However I used it so infrequently that whenever the need would arise, I would invariably screw up the order of the 2 (only 2!) arguments. I could have added support for --help, --usage or similar, but that seemed like overkill. I eventually just learned how to "properly" use find and grep (both of which I was already using anyways, which helped me remember the command line for each). With that said I do agree that I'd never use shell script or Unix userland on purpose when writing scripts that are intended to be portable across different Unices (or even Windows), that's the kind of thing I'd reserve for personal use on my own userland. Hell, even on one machine you never know with some distributions what kind of shell you'll login to by default...