> “And how many hours would you require to implement and debug that C program?” asked Nubi.

How about "How many hours would you require to write the shell script so that it handles all allowed file names appropriately?". As far as I am concerned the classes of errors are certainly different, but shell scripts have their own pitfalls.

Just yesterday I came across a one-liner that didn't work as soon as the filename had a space in the filename.