Author here. I don't know if we'll be writing shell scripts in five years for our jobs, but I do know that spending a few minutes writing sed makes me feel connected to my tribe of linuxy people with a love of unix history.

I also know that thinking about pattern matching is fun, it's a little puzzle solved with a skillset that transfers to other cli tools.

Post also opens with a classic interview question I've used for years: no ls on the box, five ways to list the directory tree you're in. A handful of answers at the bottom :)

In the beginning, there were no "blocks" to build with, so we coded everything in its entirety. Then came a higher order language, and a third and then fourth generation language.

But at each step, some very basic concepts were needed to work with the new "blocks". I'll give a non-trivial example. Working on a network monitoring system, we had alerts to deal with coming from SNMP. They had to be processed in order to give clear and actionable status.

So, whatever results come from the newest black box, they need to be processed at a high level in order to do more than inform you of the daily horoscope or whatever.

The particular software we used evolved from netlabs and we wrote custom handlers in perl, which Larry Wall invented for exactly that purpose if my history is right.

At one point, I read "Unix Text Processing" not so much for the troff lessons, but for all the working examples of shell commands. That helped me enormously in my work.

And you can get the book.

https://github.com/larrykollar/Unix-Text-Processing

https://ia800506.us.archive.org/12/items/utp_book/utp_book.p...