Learning the idiosyncrasies of the tools involved is one of the tradeoffs. But there's no getting around it. These tools have been around for far too long to change them all in some misguided attempt at consistency--the semantics of most tools are so different, it wouldn't even make sense to try to enforce some consistency anyway.
You don't have to know every flag for every tool. You don't need to know if you can glob args together in a certain tool. These are different tools developed across decades by different people for different purposes. The fact that you can glue them all together on an ad-hoc basis is magical!
You learn by learning how to do one thing at a time--cutting characters 10-20, or grepping for a regex, or summing with awk, or replacing strings with sed, or translating characters with tr--and adding it to your mental toolbox. It's okay to have a syntax error because man is there and you can easily iterate the command to make it do what you want.
You aren't writing a program to stand the test of time. You're solving a problem in the moment!
You don't have to know every flag for every tool. You don't need to know if you can glob args together in a certain tool. These are different tools developed across decades by different people for different purposes. The fact that you can glue them all together on an ad-hoc basis is magical!
You learn by learning how to do one thing at a time--cutting characters 10-20, or grepping for a regex, or summing with awk, or replacing strings with sed, or translating characters with tr--and adding it to your mental toolbox. It's okay to have a syntax error because man is there and you can easily iterate the command to make it do what you want.
You aren't writing a program to stand the test of time. You're solving a problem in the moment!