[GRLUG] Documentation

[John-Thomas Richards]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 12:59:46PM -0500, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-02-22 at 12:41 -0500, Bob Kline wrote:
[snip]
> 
> > In the early days of Unix the philosophy was to have simple commands
> > that did one thing well. 
> 
> It is common to position this as a philosophy;  I don't accept that
> there was every much of a philosophy behind UNIX (which LINUX isn't,
> LINUX is a work-alike).  UNIX is primarily a heaping pile of pragmatic
> compromises - most of which work extremely well and many of which are
> creaky.

There is a UNIX philosophy.  It is exactly as I stated: create simple
applications that do one or two (or a few) things well.  mutt is a great
example.  mutt is a mail user agent.  mutt focuses on reading mail.
Period.  Because of this, mutt does not have its own internal MTA.  mutt
does not have its own editor.  Many use vim or joe or nano or some other
editor along with it because mutt focuses on its primary raison d'être:
reading mail.  That's UNIX-y.

Many early (I started using Linux in 1997) apps followed this philosophy
(many still do).  For example, a number of CD- or DVD-ripping apps are
just front-ends that combine a number of CLI-driven apps.  Why write
software to encode when LAME does it well?

> > I think it was even put something like that.  Commands were piped so
> > the user could build up the exactly function needed at the time, and
> > one uses aliases to save often used sequences.
> 
> Most of what you describe above is a function of the shell; and not
> unique to UNIX.

Pipes are what make the UNIX philosophy possible.  It's a way to connect
together the simple apps that do one or two things well, whether it's a
function of the shell or not.  Could one create an application that
searches the filesystem for files that match one's regular expression
and puts the matches into a file?  Sure, but why?  There are apps that
can do different pieces of that.  Pipes string 'em together.

[snip]
-- 
john-thomas
------
The shorter a word, the more meanings it has.
Paul A Delaney, meteorologist

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