So I took a great unix/linux systems programming class, http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~lib215/ where you learn about all of the system software that you take for granted. Among other things, we had to write our own shell. There is an awful lot to consider, and most of it you are just trying to get to work properly. With regard to security, you feel like you are protected for the most part because the shell resides in userland and it's basically understood that you shouldn't trust foreign shell scripts.

Is the worry here that the code gets executed by the kernel or superuser, enabling privilege escalation? Otherwise it wouldn't be a big deal that extra code is executed by a function declaration.