Most of my early career was Unix, with just a little DOS and Windows thrown in (enough to persuade me to keep trying to avoid it). Unix was mature even then. T

Most of my early career was Unix, with just a little DOS and Windows thrown in (enough to persuade me to keep trying to avoid it). Unix was mature even then. There is NO WAY you would have convinced me that 30 years later I'd still be using most of that, still gluing things together with the same shell tools. Or that most of the books would still have a place on the shelf (albeit sometimes in 2nd or 3rd editions), and turn out to be classics. Ignoring big iron, we'd gone from Apple IIs to Amigas and workstations in just a few years, and hardware was changing as rapidly as the current fashion for JS frameworks does today. Yet here we are, awk, grep, sed and the other tools still feel like the right, concise answer. So why not learn them, they might greatly surprise you by their staying power.