[colug-432] Basics of the Unix Philosophy

[Rick Hornsby]

Came across the "Basics of the Unix Philosophy" linked in one of the puppet docs Scott posted a few days ago.  What I'm finding so fascinating is that while I've never seen this document before, I can see how these ideas still heavily influence and guide us today, nearly 40 years later.  I've learned much of this just through experience and observing UNIX's elegant design patterns.

I've said many of these things to my green system engineers who are just starting to get into Linux and writing their first shell scripts.  I tend to emphasize something along these lines when starting to explain pipes, redirects, etc.

"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."

http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch01s06.html