Unix Philosophy with an Example

The Unix philosophy is a set of software development concepts and norms which have shaped the way modern software is built.

Initiated in the late 60s and established over time by developers of Unix-like operating systems, the Unix philosophy brought the concepts of modularity and reusability into software engineering best practices.

Douglas McIlroy summarized the Unix philosophy as follows:

  • 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.

Let’s briefly introduce command-line filters and pipelines in order to see how these rules apply within the most popular operating systems.

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