Many of these programs are true gems; the rkhunter script, for instance is both nice code (can be improved) and a treasure trove of information*. Note that muc

Many of these programs are true gems; the rkhunter script, for instance is both nice code (can be improved) and a treasure trove of information*. Note that much of the code size of these scripts is dedicated to ensuring that the right utilities exist across the various platforms and perform as expected with their various command line options. This is the worst pain point of any serious shell script author, even worse than signals and subprocesses (unless one enjoys the pain). *Information that, I would argue, would be less transparent if rkhunter had been written in a "proper" programming language. It might be shoved off in some records in data structures to be retrieved; actions might be complex combinations of various functions---or, woe, methods and classes---on nested data structures; logging could be JSON-Bourned into pieces and compressed in some database to be accessed via other methods and so on. Shell scripts, precisely due to the lack of such complex tools, tend to "spill the beans" on what is happening. This makes rkhunter, for instance, a decent documentation of various exploits and rootkits without having to dig into file upon file, structure upon structure, DB upon DB.