I've generally found you can get most of what you need done with head, tail, grep, cut, paste, sed and tr (and maybe a couple others I'm missing). Oh, and test

I've generally found you can get most of what you need done with head, tail, grep, cut, paste, sed and tr (and maybe a couple others I'm missing). Oh, and test (both bash's and coreutil's). It can be a little hacky, but once you realize the crazy output you sometimes have to parse from third party programs, you realize that the ability to handle any free form text is pretty essential. That said, since I'm a Perl developer, I'll generally just go straight to perl's inlined implicit loop mode (-p or -n) if I need to use more than a couple of those utils, unless I want it to be portable with a minimum of requirements (as even though more binaries are used in the shell version, they're all essentially guaranteed to exist on a Linux/Unix).