Don't tell them the secret! Now they won't need you. ;)

I use perl a lot for global search and replace, for example, perl -i -pe 's/before/after/g' *.txt . I use it so much that I have pp aliased to 'perl -i -pe'.

Regarding the original post, one "easy thing" that I think it's very much worth knowing and that some novices overlook is the appropriate use of grep and map. Sometimes you can save lots of time and typing and write clearer code with grep and map.