I'm with you with both shell pipelines and Perl "one-liners". The latter was a wonderful step up from the former back in the 1990s: a modern programming language designed around paving the cowpaths of shell pipelines. The power of both has always been inspiring. So many useful, one-off tasks can be accomplished with a single line in a terminal. So much potential power.
But my problem with both has always been that I needed them often, but not quite often enough to remember them without looking things up (again). Over the years, as my memory of these commands has strengthened, I've needed them less often. We don't use computers the same way we did back then. It's like a spaced repetition system where the spacing is set to guarantee forgetting.
But my problem with both has always been that I needed them often, but not quite often enough to remember them without looking things up (again). Over the years, as my memory of these commands has strengthened, I've needed them less often. We don't use computers the same way we did back then. It's like a spaced repetition system where the spacing is set to guarantee forgetting.