[tene]

Can anyone provide some insight into possible motivations for why the authors may have chosen to use a shell here? I'm struggling to understand what value it adds over representing mda_command as an array of strings and execving that.

I don't mean this sarcastically; I'm genuinely curious about the motivations. The only thing I can come up with is that it's slightly more annoying to free an array of strings than it is to free a single string in C. Is that plausibly the only motivation to involve a shell here?