You've just let on that you don't write scripts often. Sysadmins and devops write 'glue'. All sorts of stuff that seems stupid if a human is in direct control becomes quite useful in a script.

For example, what purpose would you have for telling grep not to output the thing you searched for? Not useful for a human operator observing the results, but used all the time in scripts. "if grep -q foo /path/to/target;"...

So, if you're after a person who is going to be writing 'glue', being familiar with how glue 'sticks' is a good thing to look out for.