awk, grep, sed, and these days I add jq to my standard tool belt. I also really enjoy fish as my shell language of choice. Languages, runtimes, etc come and go but these programs remain as useful as they were 19 years ago when I first learned about them.
In our R&D Slack instance, it's amazing to see a program with great UX (Slack) enable engineers to post awk, grep, sed, jq, etc. one-liners to solve other engineers' questions. IRC has the same benefits, I'm sure, but Slack is the first command-line-style chat application to gain enough non-engineer mindshare to make it ubiquitous at any company I've worked for.
jq sounds like something I was looking for a while ago. Just installed it (apt install jq), let's see if a situation presents itself to try it out soon.