I am a student of k and now q.

The biggest problem of the shell is the rules around quoting. That includes whitespace but also many other snafus.

As for all the utilities being geared toward line-by-line (newline delimited), this is true.

But quoting can be learnt with practice; I rarely have problems because it is second nature.

And, there's a shell utility called lex. It lets you design your own utilities (filters).

And you can create filters that read multiple lines, easy as pie. (Easier than mastering awk.)

You can even create your own programming language by combining lex with another standard utility: yacc. This is how C was created.

Do they still force CS students to learn about these utilities?