The IRC channels I've been in are sometimes quite bad. I had an unpleasant experience in #lua some days ago, when I randomly attacked, for, if I recall correctly, wondering why just typing 1 returned an error.
By people who sounded like they were 12 years ago. I hope for their sake they were, but otherwise they were very immature.
In any case, I doubt that even in those channels people would idly stand by and watch someone offering criminal advice. Though I wouldn't want to test it.
@Kusalananda I rolled your edit back since gawk is how GNU awk is often installed and I wanted to make that clear (gsub is a gawk thing AFAIK) and there was nothing GNU specific about the sed. The -E flag is not POSIX, but it is widely supported. Including by GNU, BSD and even busybox sed, which cover most cases right there.
@Jesse_b I'm on my third week of vacation right now, out of seven. No plans. Saw my sister and my 91 year-old grandmother last Tuesday, and my sister's almost-two-year-old son (17.5 kg * 4 hours = lots of workout).