I don't disagree that shelling out sucks, but the entire silent failure scenario in their example is the result of using the explicit to_i conversion method. Us

I don't disagree that shelling out sucks, but the entire silent failure scenario in their example is the result of using the explicit to_i conversion method. Using to_i on an inconsistent data source is always prone to failure because of how it defaults to 0. Integer(`find #{dir} -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep foo | wc -l`) is unlikely to fail because of bad input.