I wrote a line oriented IRC client in BASH as a homework and proof of concept.
It should work in POSIX compatible environments, its most special requirements are telnet and md5sums. Its architecture makes easy writing bots… if you have a virtual machine, jail or chroot environment for it.
My favorite IPC solution is appending variable definitions to a temporary file, and sourcing it from different threads.
The release contains the script, a sample configuration file, and a manpage.
Magyar