Unix Philosophy

TotT: 2014

McIlory

"This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface."
- Douglas McIlroy

Gancarz

• Small is beautiful.
• Make each program do one thing well.
...
• Store data in flat text files.
...

- Mike Gancarz

Gabriel

"worse is better ... simplicity of both the interface and the implementation are more important than any other attributes of the system—including correctness, consistency, and completeness."
- Wikipedia

Many perspectives, one philosophy.

KISS

Brooks

• Accidental complexity stems from problems we create on our own.
• Essential complexity is inherent in the problem to be solved.

- Fred Brooks

Demo: Small Superlatives

echo, cat, tr

Demo: Small Superlatives

Demo: Text Everywhere

/etc/passwd, /etc/hosts, /etc/rc2.d/*

Demo: Text Everywhere

Standard Streams

Pipes and Redirects

Demo: Pipes and Redirects

>, <, |, sort, uniq, head

Demo: Pipes and Redirects

Review

• Unix Philosophy
• Small Tools
• Text
• Standard Streams
• Pipes and Redirects