IF, ON MY WAY TO EXILE ON A DESERT ISLAND, I had to choose between an IDE and the Unix toolchest, I'd pick the Unix tools without a second thought. Here are the reasons why you should become proficient with Unix tools.
Furthermore, while IDEs offer just the commands their developers conceived, with Unix tools you can perform any task you can imagine.
Most tools work like filters, processing just a single line at the time, meaning that there is no upper limit in the amount of data they can handle.
The small-is-beautiful provenance and open source implementations of the Unix tools make them ubiquitously available, even on resource-constrained platforms, like my set-top media player or DSL router.
if none of the available tools matches your needs, it's very easy to extend the world of the Unix tools.
