There's significantly less complex ways to do this sort of thing, though. One that I've been looking at implementing into a distro lately is nosh[0] (and execli

There's significantly less complex ways to do this sort of thing, though. One that I've been looking at implementing into a distro lately is nosh[0] (and execline[1]). Every bit of code is implemented as a separate, independent utility that can be chained together through the nosh/execlineb "shell", which does no parsing and only a tiny bit of lexing. This way, it's easy to pick and choose what features and complexity each script needs, and the features that you don't use can't affect you. Nothing is running on your system that you don't know about, and there's no complex "magic" anywhere unless you explicitly ran a command which does magic things. [0] http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwares/nosh.html http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwar... [1] http://skarnet.org/software/execline/ http://skarnet.org/software/execline/