Once you get a hang of how shell constructs like pipes, redirections, globs, variable/command substitutions, etc, the various cli text processing tools like grep, sed, awk, perl, sort, tr, pr, paste, etc are worth to learn at least the basics. They have been through years of use and heavily optimized for performance. Just today, a friend of mine called to ask how to improve a Python script's performance for 5-10 MB text file. After confirming he isn't using any other special modules, I advised to check if the performance improves by implementing it using awk.
If anyone's interested in examples based tutorials on cli text processing tools, check out my github repo [2]
[1] https://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/why-learn-awk/
[2] https://github.com/learnbyexample/Command-line-text-processi...