Sometimes I think complicated shell scripting is just some weird form of vanity. By making something simple look utterly incomprehensible some people think they're looking really clever to their colleagues (when in reality they're just annoying the hell out of them.) It's the same urge that spawns bizarre C++ template meta-programming and macros that are more complicated than the problem they're solving. I don't mind those things when people just admit they were bored or doing it for laughs, but the number of people that do those things with no sense of irony is way more than I'd care to really think about.
