Should a beginner (like myself) take the time to learn awk? If the default shell in debian changes to zsh some day then likely I'll also migrate to zsh as well. That's not to say that any of these are bad tools, they just aren't as universal as bash is (currently). I use bash primarily because on the systems I manage bash is always going to be there unlike xonsh, zsh, nushell, or any other alternative shell. There is overlap in their functionality but there is also uniqueness too and depending on what exactly I need to do one may be preferable over another. I'm a systems administrator and I use all awk, grep, cut, sed, and bash. So, my question is which tools do other programmers or Linux enthusiasts believe to still be worthwhile learning in today's technology ecosystem? So, my question is which tools (command line, filesystem navigation, programming) do other programmers or Linux enthusiasts believe to still be worthwhile learning in today's technology ecosystem? Should a beginner (like myself) take the time to learn awk? Is there a reasonable chance that certain of these commonly used core utilities will soon obsolesce? If so, which ones? What about any tools/technologies looming ahead of us that may, or are expected to, replace such older ones? Are there any we should look forward to and prepare for?įor the sake of clean, readable, efficient, and fast code, it seems to me inevitable that some of these tools will eventually lose their value. For example, couldn't Python do everything those other tools do? Given the new functionality introduced by these shells, it seems that there's even more overlap in the functionality of core tools than there was previously. Now we have xonsh shell, which integrates Python, and Nushell, which treats data differently than all other past shells (I think).

I'm sure most readers can think of even better examples than this (I'm a novice).

Similarly, loops and conditionals can provide the same functionality as xargs. Awk, it seems to me, can often replace tools like grep, cut, and sed. When someone learns these tools, one thing they realize is that there's significant overlap in some of their functionality. They'll also usually provide some information on writing scripts and functions, specifically mentioning their ability to process conditionals and loops. In doing so, they'll discuss certain of the more commonly used programs that partly constitute the core utilities, such as grep, sed, cut, xargs, and awk.

Books on using the Linux command line tend to focus primarily on Bash, somewhat less on POSIX, and then perhaps a little on zsh, dash, or ksh.

Xonsh vs vim