Whenever I try to do anything sorta remotely complicated in a single in in Bash (for x in blah ; do ; done combined with maybe a pipe or sed or some backticks or xargs) it quickly devolves into not remotely working how I want it to, but instead spewing out errors that show things have gone terribly, terribly wrong. And figuring out what specifically - presumably usually something about whitespace, or newlines, or IFS or whatever - is the problem is a nightmare in and of itself. There's no debugger I know of, etc. So all in all I think the claim that Unix is this shangri-la of just being able to pipe things together is sorta just bunkum, from any halfway respectable usability perspective.