Interesting, thanks for clearing that up. Wouldn’t have thought that this is so common but then again I’m living in a bubble where I mostly know well educated people.

I could not find info on how they get to 20-25% functionally illiterate. That seems way too high. 17% for Germany. Do you know how they define illiterate?

I had a similar construct in my bashrc and forgot the quotes. It didn’t throw an error but also didn’t work. Took quite a while to find the issue. So personally, I would recommend trying to quote correctly whenever possible.