Yes, I agree and also thought of shell aliases when I read this. On top of that there's an argument forming somewhere in my mind that this also sets a bad secur

Yes, I agree and also thought of shell aliases when I read this. On top of that there's an argument forming somewhere in my mind that this also sets a bad security precedent in the long term... although I can't put my finger on it exactly. Any place where you unnecessarily widen the range of possible inputs (especially in a shell interface) seems to invite future abuse. For example, what if some future maintainer decides to make this a regex match?