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This is 13 lines of Bash plus GPG which is available ~everywhere and a pretty lowish level Linux dependency. SOPS is +20KLOC of Go with support for cloud KMS etc etc. I think you got your mystery meat analogy backwards.

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The mystery meat in question is GPG, not sops or this.

(I also wouldn’t call GPG a low level dependency.)

lowish. Meaning if you run a Linux desktop env with a mild amount of software installed it's likely pulled in already.

I’ve used a Linux desktop for my entire adult life, and I’m pretty sure GPG has never been bundled directly with my environment. I used to install it directly, but I haven’t needed that in years either since everything I needed GPG for (= git) supports SSH signing instead.

So is Perl, that doesn’t make it a good argument to use it still for the same reasons.

Perl is horrible, but for one-liners it's strictly less horrible than either sed or awk, which people still use because they are less horrible than pure Bourne shell for some common tasks.

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