Command-line tools where you glue byte streams are, in spirit, very much like web scraping. Sure, tools can be good or bad, but by design you are going to have

Command-line tools where you glue byte streams are, in spirit, very much like web scraping. Sure, tools can be good or bad, but by design you are going to have ad-hoc input/output formats, and for some tools this is interleaved with presentation/visual stuff (colors, alignment, headers, whitespaces, etc.). In a way web apps are then more alike standard unix stuff, where you parse whatever output you get, hoping that it has enough usable structure to do an acceptable job. The most reusable web apps are those that offer an API, with JSON/XML data formats where you can easily automate your work, and connect them together.