I'm not the person you replied to but I thought I'd give you a little basic example of the commands they were referencing.

Powershell, if you start getting deep into it, is great for structured data (e.g. json, yaml, or "absorbing" spreadsheets into an "object") so it's great for doing weird shit with AD.

Unix and sh/bash is "old school unix style" and absolutely sucks for "objects" but was built for mangling text streams. You can chain the output of one command into another with the pipe symbol | (also in batch and powershell). You're probably going to be using these commands most of the time:

cat dump a file out to "stdout" stream (console)

less read a file / buffer an incoming stream and let you scroll through it

grep search a file or incoming stream for a word or regex

awk very powerful but to start with just think of it for grabbing a particular column of text

find find a file on disk (e.g. modified in the last week, is a folder, has this in it's name) and optionally run a command on it

sed "Stream EDitor" - run a regex on the stream (so if you wanted to censor a username from a log, you can cat log.log | sed 's/username/placeholder/'

Then you can do silly things with sh / bash's syntax:

file $(which grep): $() means run which grep (which tells you where the program is), then substitute it's output into the command (e.g. this will "run" file /usr/bin/grep)

for user in $(getent group scanner | awk -F: '{ print $4 }' | sed 's/,/ /' ); do echo $user; done:

• getent group scanner: get the group "scanner"
• awk -F: '{ print $4 }' : using:` as a separator, print the fourth column
• sed 's/,/ /': regex - replace , with (a space)
• for user in $(...); do .... done: for each item (space separated word) between in and ; do place it into a variable called user, and run the command
• echo $user: print out the variable