Greetings, and welcome!
This is not a forum for Hackers so if that is your purpose, it is pointless to post here, you will be banned very shortly...
You mention you are in the process of developing a utility, fine only we cant help you not knowing what is its purpose, from what I understand its a shell script, as such there are no true standards, as you are free to implement whatever the way you want, it gets more tricky if the idea is that it should have a natural UNIX feeling, in such case look how the different vendors implement their stuff and find a suitable compromise, knowing there are rules on man pages ( 1: users, 1M: system administration etc...)
For the rest, up to you but the main point is more you make things complex more you suffer to maintain and update, using ordinary good coding practice and keeping up the documentation in the script is essential, 4-5 undocumented modifications, and suddenly you fall on a side effect bug, you will spend quite some time to figure out what is going on...
We are always ready and interested to see what people are capable to achieve in shell scripts only the rules here are :
- - You explain your goals
- - You show ( code) what you have done so far, if with issues then with error output
- - When someone corrects or give you some code, you test it and give us some feedback
- - You accept to be open-minded as, see first rules, depending of your level of understanding and knowledge, you may see some here have quite some imagination.. and you will have many different solutions to your aims, and the best way to learn is to test them all and ask for what you don't understand in the code, or procedure, as we all have different background our ways of resolving depends of our experience...
So the is not much more to say until we know a bit more about your project...