If the problem is simple enough to be solved by a shell script, then obviously literate programming is going to be overkill. Algorithmic problems such as data-structures are well suited for literate programming.
I wrote in a literate programming style for years, to generate LaTeX documents and a world-scale build system for a multinational. But I'm past that, since it's intricate and unmaintainable by others. Instead, I'd rather generate documents in UTF-8 (an ASCII-compatible and increasingly universal format), and sets of small tools which call each other and expose their data in files for new tools to use. With this approach I can evolve the toolset in small, state-preserving steps, to minimize how much I have to code to meet current needs and implement new approaches.
If the problem warrants it, you can revisit it later to do something more ornate. In the meantime, you've got what you need to move on.