That’s why I included Perl, it is always there. Just don’t code as if you were in the nineties and Perl is a perfectly legitimate language, even more so for shell tasks. Bad and good doesn’t depend so much on the language but the coder.

Why not use Perl or python for scripting tasks? Bash script is terrible imo.

Why do you assume, they had no such concern? There were seals to ensure authenticity and avoid man in the middle attacks. There were encoded messages, smoke, flags, light and sound signals. Trusted couriers, pigeons, etc …