I think it's mostly a matter of chance more than anything else.

If you've jumped straight into programming, you'll probably consider any of those problems as a nail to your C/JS/Java/Python Hammer.

I was lucky to be initiated to the GNU / UNIX toolset by operation folks when doing tech support in a SAAS biz. We were dealing with a lot of text files and it didn't feel right to offload whatever my problem was to them, so I started learning from them and the scripts they wrote.

Mostly trivial stuff, such as in a directory, only select the relevant files, iterate through them to sum up something or find exactly the bit of information you need.

This allowed me to decrease time spent looking for the answer to my current case or colleague's case.

Of course, I then built those functionalities into a .bashrc (or was it bash_profile?) script to help my fellow support folks finding the answer on their own..

Turns out, most people don't want to have anything to do with a command prompt, even if the hard part has been done for you. That's been a pretty good lesson BTW.

Fast forward a few years later to now and I'm realising a good amount of stuff I've been writing lately could potentially be GNU'd instead of writing a Python script.

So that's how it goes I guess.