There's a problem with the quoting punctuation in the shell examples and Bash script -- for example:

“$creation_date”

These are called typographic, or curly, or curved, or book, or smart quotation marks. They are also called 66 and 99 marks -- what they look like. These are not the ASCII quote character. When I copy and paste the script to a temp file and do:

cat -nv delete.me

I see a lot of wide (non-ASCII) characters. Sorry I cannot suggest why this is happening in your article.