It is an amazingly powerful bug. In what system can you plug a magic value ("() {") into a variable which everyone expects to hold static data, and have the va

It is an amazingly powerful bug. In what system can you plug a magic value ("() {") into a variable which everyone expects to hold static data, and have the value of the variable interpreted as code and executed spontaneously on invocation? And: The magic value is undocumented. And: Any instance in the entire tree of calls will do this. Some of this is strictly on bash. But some of it also has to do with the environment feature of Unix, which is basically a god object with all the power and temptation ("look what we could get for free if we let it be a function!") that entails.