On learning to use geeky tools to boost productivity, or "May you solve interesting problems"

Under the heading "May you Solve Interesting problems"
"The primary motivation for learning sed and awk [two geeky text-editing tools] is that they are useful for devising general solutions to text editing problems. For some people, myself included, the satisfaction of solving a problem is the difference between work and drudgery. Given the choice of using vi [a normal text editing program] or sed to make a series of repeated edits over a number of files, I will choose sed, simply because it makes the problem more interesting to me. I am finding a solution instead of repeating a series of keystrokes. Besides, once I accomplish my task, I congratulate myself on being clever. I feel like I have done a little bit of magic and spared myself some dull labor."

Dale Dougherty, sed & awk page 2, No Starch Press.

awk and sed

Two programs that are suppossed to be great for processing text are awk and sed. According to Haddock and Dunn's Practical Computing For Biologists (2010), the are similar to other general expression environments like the shell function grep, but they "are like programming languages" and provide "even more opportunities to perform complex tasks" (page 78).