For the Love of All That's Holy, Use CCL to Control Complexity in Your Systems

It's kind of ironic that the example of "simple" code is a shell command which has many hidden gremlins. Just off the top of my head:

- It swallows extra spaces between the arguments.

- If the first argument starts with a hyphen the behaviour is implementation-dependent.

- In Bash, if there's an exclamation mark anywhere except the last character of any argument Bash tries to do event lookup instead of treating the string as a literal.

More fun examples at https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/65803/3645.

I would trust the second piece of code much more than the first, despite the complexity.

A running joke in the industry is job security through obscurity. Same applies to just plain security.