Sometimes when doing offensive security work you end up in the strangest environments with limited tools, odd quirks, broken shells, and god knows what else. But you know what is almost always available and just works? PHP.

Nop. awk, bash or some POSIX shell certainly. Perl most likely, despite it’s plunge in popularity. On a modern Mac, awk, bash and Perl are preinstalled with the system. PHP is not even necessarily present at system level on a PHP dev box as it might be only installed in some container.