Maybe it's more important to rewrite half a century of poorly documented and specified shell scripts that are so embedded that their existence gets in way of re

Maybe it's more important to rewrite half a century of poorly documented and specified shell scripts that are so embedded that their existence gets in way of rewriting fundamental Unix command line utilities, than it is to rewrite those utilities themselves. Any time someone makes the claim "we shouldn't touch this code, it's fragile" that state of affairs is itself bad. Our free software source code shouldn't be some poorly understood black box that we're afraid to touch for fear of breaking something, and if it is that is something we should fix.