Best way to distribute script with low friction I have helped a few friends recently with fixing a problem on OS X and I would like to turn it in to a script so I can send it to people instead of walking them through it. It consists of two steps:


delete a file
restart the computer


What is the best way to package this so people will be able to execute it with the default security settings on Mountain Lion and Mavericks? AppleScript, Automator, Shell script?
AppleScript is imho the best one for your case. Shell needs sudo for shutdown -r and automator is overkill for these basic needs. 

Here are the 2 basic scripts you'll need : 

To reboot : 

tell application "Finder"
  restart
end tell


To delete a file :

tell application "Finder" to delete file "path:to:file"


If you want to use a posix path, an alternative to the previous one is 

tell application "Finder" to delete POSIX path of "/path/to/file"