What is the most crude Unix tool you've ever used?

sed and awk command strings can be quite long.

One can do a lot combining find with cpio or tar to selectively extract files for backup.

I don't consider any of this to be "crude"; I find it quite elegant.

That sounds like a very deliberate description of find...

For some stuff I sometimes wonder if the author can actually remember the logic behind e.g.: flags order or the syntax.

tar has a confusing ordering of parameters (as compared to other UNIX tools) and handling of switches. It's one of those tools that I don't use that often, so I always have to look up examples.

I'm not the only one... see https://xkcd.com/1168/

czf, and xzf are all you really need to know most of the time. Oh, and sometimes cjf and xjf.

ln

It just does too many things. Confusing switches. Confusing order of arguments. Easy to mess up.

Ugh.