[lottin]

You're mistaken. Bash functions and unix commands return an exit status (an integer), never text.

[nailer]

That's for status, not data. A time in bash is a set of characters, not a time.

[lottin]

All the shell does is allow the user to redirect input and output streams to/from system commands. Whether these commands output/read text or binary data or both is irrelevant from the shell's standpoint.