The book "Unix Power Tools" showed me that higher-level programming languages (Perl, Python, Ruby, etc) are not needed to accomplish most administrative tasks. Awk is incredibly useful (but also very confusing, imo).
$ cd /big/long/path/to/this.txt Oops $ vim !$
It's also apparently not universally known that bash has csh-style (similar to sed) editing, so "s^foo^bar" will repeat the previous command with "bar" substituted at for bar. So "ls foo" becomes "ls bar".
Similarly with !-3:s^foo^bar
I freely mix these things with readline-editing, depending on what needs to be done.
Since csh gets a lot of disrespect these days, to give credit where due: these are all Bill Joy features from the original csh -- it's a good thing that bash borrowed innovations from various shells beyond Bourne shell and ksh.
Historical footnote: We donated code to him to do readline-style editing circa 1978, but he said raw mode was bogging down the pdp 11 too much. Systems were a bit slower back then.