[worseisworse]

>Any sane programming community would string me up by my thumbs for doing this, and rightly so.

How do you explain shell scripting then? Bash and co. have been 'industry best practice' for decades. They feature all these problems of in-band communication and (attempts at) escaping and nobody seems to consider it a problem.

[mikeash]

Shell scripting is another insane domain where stuff that would be crazy everywhere else is suddenly accepted. Fortunately, they at least recognize that it's usually a bad idea to feed potentially hostile data to local scripts.