This sounds very nice. I agree with you - I just can't believe that some people would consider doing such a task manually. Doing it manually, is, of course, highly error-prone not to mention tedious.

Another example is for a site I was working on. It required JPEG files to be named like days of the year, e.g. 010199.jpg 010299.jpg and so on. I had to do this for several years of files, and naturally I didn't really fancy doing it manually. Out comes a Perl script and bingo! It's done!