When I am forced to use a Windows environment I find myself reaching out to these evergreen tools in many situations and is frustrated by having to find workarounds to these tools that should be ubiquitous tools in any OS.

Everything I learned almost 30 years ago still holds true today when it comes to the basics.

And yes I know of Cygwin, MKS toolkit etc, but trying to convince corporate IT in a Microsoft Centric world to install these usually hits a brick wall.

Lots of times it is really nice to have all your "debugging scripts" in a repo anyway. Once you have that it isn't hard to set up a basic Python environment and have your scripts there.

Not every OS needs to be an UNIX clone.

If you want to direct the learning, though, I'd recommend figuring out how to do something with grep, e.g., then do the same with sed, awk, cut, etc.

For example:

grep myuserid /etc/passwd

sed -n '/myuserid/p' /etc/passwd

awk '/myuserid/ { print }

etc.

Then make it more interesting: repeat those with 'grep -I MYUSERID /etc/passwd'.

Then make it even more interesting: print the 4th field from each matching line. (Hint: man cut.) Come up with at least two or three different ways of doing this with regex's, then make those regex's as compact as possible.

Then make it a lot more interesting: print the two lines before and the three lines after each pattern.

Once you do this for a while, you will get used to thinking in terms of filters and regex and things will start to come more naturally for you.

Also consider doing all of those exercises from within vim, use :g... commands (or any other alternative you can think of).

I used this a great deal, when I first started out on serious UNIX tasks (1996+)