I'd have to throw most of the standard UNIX utils in there: grep, awk, cut, sed, sort, uniq, and of course, vim.
Outside of the tech world, people seem to think that grabbing some columns out of a file and rearranging them or pasting them somewhere else is some kind of sorcery.
One unix based utility that has saved me incredible amounts of time is 'vimv'.[1]
You run vimv and you get your pwd, in the editor, and you can edit it like a text file. Then just quit and save and all of your filename changes get committed to that directory.
It's an extremely fast way to do a bunch of random and irregular edits to a big directory full of files.
"1) some guru out there has probably done a blog post on how to automate things with all of these."
… in 1982, before the word "blog" even existed - and the advice/instructions still work just fine on any modern vaguely posix/unix-like command shell, including Mac and Windows which also didn't exist when the piece was written.
(Gopher search in "Unix - Utilities - Tutorials - sed and awk - brian kernighan" or dial in to your WELL bbs number and ask for a copy of "sed-awk-tutorial.txt" in the Software conference...)
That dev lead was fundamentally wrong and you did well. I dare say that as a Wordpress developer, knowing your Unix tools you have a significant advantage compared to the rest.
there is something incredibly beautiful about the command line, and being able to pipe stuff through those things at lightning speed, finding exactly what you want. its so pure, and so useful. and its fun to look at the source for those too. ive gotten alot of mileage out using the basics + jq (https://stedolan.github.io/jq/) to inspect data.
Three of my forty coworkers actually understand the command-line on a level nearly on par with me, and I'm not an expert (locally, yes; globally, hardly). It's been frustrating me since my first real job in industry and others in government. I think I got spoiled in college by being surrounded by (mostly) curious tinkerers who had no problem delving into the multitude of tools that were available and exploring them. Post-school, people seem to lose that curiosity, if they ever possessed it, as a group.
I've been in job situations where just picking up a handful of hotkeys for a program is seen as Deep Wizardry. Most people just never learn how to do things like that.
It sounds like you took the wrong job. I was surrounded by curious tinkerers in school, and I'm very happy to say that at my first two jobs I have been surrounded by curious tinkerers.
Possibly, but doubtful. I suppose really it's the unwillingness to learn (by otherwise educated and intelligent people, so they have or at least had the capacity for learning at one point). This is just a glaring example in the programming field. We literally program computers to do whatever we want (modulo performance or physical limitations), why would our tools be any different?
>I'd have to throw most of the standard UNIX utils in there: grep, awk, cut, sed, sort, uniq, and of course, vim.
Agreed. I'd just add that there are many more tools along the same lines (just have to look in the various bin directories, and not to forget custom ones that people write in C / shell / other languages and combinations of the same), and that it is how they work together - because of a few powerful key concepts like pipes, I/O redirection, file wildcards, the various metacharacters starting with $ and others - that really makes the system powerful, more than any individual tool, though those play a part too.
Outside of the tech world, people seem to think that grabbing some columns out of a file and rearranging them or pasting them somewhere else is some kind of sorcery.