I expect this to be something that an admin (or me) would run from the shell prompt

No reason not to validate the input. It's a good habit to get into even if your granting full privilledges to the user (and always question if this is neccessary, least privilledge is good, blah blah blah) .

And yes, if you're wondering, this post is just a thinly veiled attempt to cover up the fact that I didn't read all of your original post and just gave a carbon copy answer (it's still good advice though :).

Anyways, have a good one :)