I guess the URL path in the Nginx log would be URL-encoded and have a %20 instead of a space. And otherwise, it would actually also a problem of that text based log format that uses spaces as field delimiters itself.

Anyway: When I can "build up from the command line", then apparently whatever I'm building up can be easily and intuitively done in the command line. So, stuffing it into a bash script is fast and easy and should be easy to understand as well.

I just have real-world applications for small scripts that aren't much bigger than those "cute little bash examples". When you work with embedded systems, you do a lot of repeatable stuff via SSH. I once ported an Installer to Python and now I hate it because it has so much unhelpful noise between the actual relevant commands being executed.

Yes, Bash has it's issues and requires some discipline, but so do most other languages.