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Comment by agentultra | Hacker News Reader

awk, grep, sed, and these days I add jq to my standard tool belt. I also really enjoy fish as my shell language of choice. Languages, runtimes, etc come and go but these programs remain as useful as they were 19 years ago when I first learned about them.

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I used sed today to complete a "large story" in a single command. Felt like a badass.

The email to the product owner was more work than the "coding".

> I used sed today to complete a "large story" in a single command.

Great, I sometimes do that, too. Downside is that your patience level for "enterprise architecture" goes way down.

In our R&D Slack instance, it's amazing to see a program with great UX (Slack) enable engineers to post awk, grep, sed, jq, etc. one-liners to solve other engineers' questions. IRC has the same benefits, I'm sure, but Slack is the first command-line-style chat application to gain enough non-engineer mindshare to make it ubiquitous at any company I've worked for.

Oh I can't remember the time before `jq`. It should be part of the standard linux toolset.

gawk & awk are often underrated, I use them frequently especially in contrast to my colleagues who insist upon using "cut" to split command-output.

Of course for larger jobs there is perl, but using gawk/awk in a one-liner always feels nice.

doing something with jq always makes me feel like i have super powers.

it takes a while to learn how to tame it, but it's crazy powerful.

jq sounds like something I was looking for a while ago. Just installed it (apt install jq), let's see if a situation presents itself to try it out soon.

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