Well, its only intuitive because you already memorized what all the options and command lines do. I for one don't even remember how to use head, I just
sed 15q
instead of head -n 15, s/// is clearer than a cut sometimes. if you're starting unix, learning sed/awk is enough to do everything.
As someone who teaches this stuff, I don't think so? Down the line you can do memorization of quicker ways, but I think "memorization" and "intuition" are opposites here.
As in, starting the pipeline with "cat" every time makes intuitive sense more than taking the time to figure out which command to start with?
Sure, is egrep a|egrep b| egrep c more intuitive than awk '/a/ && /b/ && /c/'. sure, until you need to have more control over the pipe, in which case, you already forked to awk. so why not go all the way and keep the operation as an awk expression? The great thing about it is, the more you use a tool, the faster you are at using it.
