Recently I have discovered that my metaprogramming efforts have started to infect (you are what you feed your brain with) my way of writing shell scripts.
Earlier it felt dirty and "non-unixy" to generate temporary shell scripts. I felt pride every time I managed to avoid it using xargs, find -exec, functions, loops etc.
Now it feels quite good to process a set of files by generating separate commands for each file, piping them first to less for manual reviewing and finally to a new bash for execution. And it feels even better to manipulate the script with sed.
Originally published on 2007-08-06 at http://www.jroller.com/wipu/entry/my_shell_scripts_start_to under category Metaprogramming