[linschn]

Thanks for the pointer about the useless use of true.

Using builtins may be a security risk as they can be overloaded (hence the use of full paths everywhere).

I did not know about bash's extension of printf to print a date. I need to use the builtin to use it though. But I've received good advice elsewhere on how to do that securely, so I'll do it and do a write-up because it's not information that's easy to come by.

Your advice is very helpful, thank you.

[TristanBall]

Bash and zsh both allow:

  function /usr/bin/cat { echo hello; }; 
  /usr/bin/cat
  hello

So specifying a path isn't as useful as it seems

[pgtan]

for builtin security see for example https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/102746/how-to-invok...