For myself: specialized tools are useful, but the commandline utility set lends itself, as Kernighan and Pike noted in The UNIX Programming Environment over a quarter century ago, to very rapid prototyping and developing. You can accomplish a great deal in a few well-understood lines of shell (which is to say, UNIX utilities).
Yes, sometimes the full power of a programming or scripting language is what you need, and in cases it may execute faster (though you may well be surprised -- the shell utilities are often highly optimised), but if a one-liner, or even a few brief lines can accomplish the task, why bother with the heavier tool?
Yes, sometimes the full power of a programming or scripting language is what you need, and in cases it may execute faster (though you may well be surprised -- the shell utilities are often highly optimised), but if a one-liner, or even a few brief lines can accomplish the task, why bother with the heavier tool?