diff --git a/linux_configuration/scripts/single_use/utils/download_nltk_data.py b/linux_configuration/scripts/single_use/utils/download_nltk_data.py
new file mode 100755
index 0000000..0d3064a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/linux_configuration/scripts/single_use/utils/download_nltk_data.py
@@ -0,0 +1,53 @@
+#!/usr/bin/env python3
+"""Download the NLTK corpora the plagiarism tools need.
+
+Extracted from `install_plagiarism_tools.sh`, which used to run this as an
+inline `python3 -c` block. Inline Python is invisible to ruff, mypy, pylint,
+bandit and pytest, so it lives in its own module instead.
+
+`nltk` is a dependency of the plagiarism toolchain, not of this repo, so it is
+absent from `meta/requirements.txt` on purpose. The installer script pip-installs
+it immediately before invoking this module, and probes for it first.
+"""
+
+from __future__ import annotations
+
+import importlib
+import sys
+
+#: Corpora required by the plagiarism checker. `punkt_tab` is the post-3.8.2
+#: replacement for `punkt`; both are listed so the script works on either.
+CORPORA = (
+    "punkt",
+    "stopwords",
+    "punkt_tab",
+    "averaged_perceptron_tagger",
+    "wordnet",
+)
+
+
+def main() -> int:
+    """Download every corpus, reporting any that fail.
+
+    Returns 1 if any download failed, so the calling shell script's `set -e`
+    sees a real failure instead of a silent partial install.
+    """
+    # Imported dynamically, not at module scope: nltk belongs to the plagiarism
+    # toolchain rather than this repo, so it is deliberately absent from
+    # meta/requirements.txt and unresolvable to static analysis. The installer
+    # pip-installs it immediately before invoking this module.
+    try:
+        nltk = importlib.import_module("nltk")
+    except ImportError:
+        sys.stderr.write("error: nltk is not installed\n")
+        return 1
+
+    failed = [corpus for corpus in CORPORA if not nltk.download(corpus)]
+    if failed:
+        sys.stderr.write(f"error: failed to download: {', '.join(failed)}\n")
+        return 1
+    return 0
+
+
+if __name__ == "__main__":
+    raise SystemExit(main())
diff --git a/linux_configuration/scripts/single_use/utils/install_plagiarism_tools.sh b/linux_configuration/scripts/single_use/utils/install_plagiarism_tools.sh
index ed8b457..3956090 100755
--- a/linux_configuration/scripts/single_use/utils/install_plagiarism_tools.sh
+++ b/linux_configuration/scripts/single_use/utils/install_plagiarism_tools.sh
@@ -81,14 +81,7 @@ success "Python NLP packages installed"
 
 # Download NLTK data
 echo "Downloading NLTK data (stopwords, punkt tokenizer)..."
-python3 -c "
-import nltk
-nltk.download('punkt')
-nltk.download('stopwords')
-nltk.download('punkt_tab')
-nltk.download('averaged_perceptron_tagger')
-nltk.download('wordnet')
-"
+python3 "$(dirname "$0")/download_nltk_data.py"
 success "NLTK data downloaded"
 
 # Download spaCy English model (small)