This is why Unix practice of being so thoroughly stringly-typed is bad, especially when combined with advice like yours. At every stage, someone is going to cut corners and don't parse just that one "freak occurrence". Then someone wants to wire a bunch of things together and they start to fail, as with so many corners cut on the way, you're bound to hit one.

And it all starts with stringly typed data and asking everyone to make half-baked parsers and serializers on the fly.