[colug-432] The UNIX Philosophy

Steve Roggenkamp roggenkamps at acm.org
Tue Aug 30 18:06:17 EDT 2011


_The UNIX Programming Environment_ was one of the books I used to learn how
to make use of UNIX in the late 80s and 90s.  The chapter on program
development is an amazing example of technical writing.  In the space of one
not-too-long chapter Kernighan and Pike start with a simple program to
implement a four function calculator, introduce lex and yacc, move through a
series of increasing complex programs culminating with a small programming
language.  Along the way they work in the use of make to manage building the
programs.  Great memories.

Steve

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 10:47 AM, <jep200404 at columbus.rr.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 29 Aug 2011 12:51:39 -0400, Stephen Potter <spp at unixsa.net> wrote:
>
> > ... for CLI usage, how often do you really do more than two commands?
>
> As you have heard from several posters: often.
>
> We are following the UNIX philosophy. Instead of having one big
> program to do everything, we have many small programs. Each
> little program does one thing well. The power comes from how we
> combine the little programs to do complex things. The pipe is an
> important part of how we combine them.
>
> A classic book about doing this is:
>
>   The UNIX Programming Environment
>   by Kernighan and Pike[2]
>
> A good book about the UNIX philosophy is:
>
>   The UNIX Philosophy
>   by Mike Gancarz[1]
>
> Both are good reads. The first book will make you powerful.
>
> [1]
> https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Unix_philosophy#Mike_Gancarz:_The_UNIX_Philosophy
> [2]
> https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/The_UNIX_Programming_Environment
>
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