187 lines
3.8 KiB
HTML
187 lines
3.8 KiB
HTML
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<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
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<HTML
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><HEAD
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><TITLE
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>The Unix Tools Philosophy</TITLE
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><META
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NAME="GENERATOR"
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CONTENT="Modular DocBook HTML Stylesheet Version 1.7"><LINK
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REL="HOME"
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TITLE="GNU/Linux Command-Line Tools Summary"
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HREF="index.html"><LINK
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REL="PREVIOUS"
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TITLE="License"
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HREF="license.html"><LINK
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REL="NEXT"
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TITLE="Shell Tips"
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HREF="shell-tips.html"></HEAD
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CLASS="CHAPTER"
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><TR
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COLSPAN="3"
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>GNU/Linux Command-Line Tools Summary</TH
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><TD
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WIDTH="10%"
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VALIGN="bottom"
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>Prev</A
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WIDTH="80%"
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WIDTH="10%"
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ALIGN="right"
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VALIGN="bottom"
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HREF="shell-tips.html"
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>Next</A
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></TD
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ALIGN="LEFT"
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WIDTH="100%"></DIV
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><DIV
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CLASS="CHAPTER"
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><H1
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><A
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NAME="THE-UNIX-TOOLS-PHILOSOPHY"
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></A
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>Chapter 3. The Unix Tools Philosophy</H1
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><P
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>A tool is a simple program, usually designed for a specific purpose, it is sometimes referred to (at least throughout this document) as a command.</P
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><P
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>The “ Unix tools philosophy” emerged during the creation of the <SPAN
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CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
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>UNIX</SPAN
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> operating system, after the breakthrough invention of the pipe '|' (refer to <A
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HREF="directing-input-ouput.html"
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>Chapter 6</A
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> for information on using the pipe).</P
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><P
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>The pipe allowed the output of one program to be sent to the input of another. The tools philosophy was to have small programs to accomplish a particular task instead of trying to develop large monolithic programs to do a large number of tasks. To accomplish more complex tasks, tools would simply be connected together, using pipes.</P
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><P
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>All the core UNIX system tools were designed so that they could operate together. The original text-based editors (and even <SPAN
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CLASS="APPLICATION"
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>TeX</SPAN
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> and LaTeX) use <SPAN
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CLASS="ACRONYM"
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>ASCII</SPAN
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> (the American text encoding standard; an open standard) and you can use tools such as; <EM
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>sed</EM
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>, <EM
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>awk</EM
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>, <EM
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>vi</EM
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>, <EM
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>grep</EM
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>, <EM
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>cat</EM
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>, <EM
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>more</EM
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>, <EM
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>tr</EM
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> and various other text-based tools in conjunction with these editors. </P
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><P
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>Using this philosophy programmers avoided writing a program (within their larger program) that had already been written by someone else (this could be considered a form of code recycling). For example, command-line spell checkers are used by a number of different applications instead of having each application create its own own spell checker.</P
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><P
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>This philosophy lives on today in GNU/Linux and various other <SPAN
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CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
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>UNIX</SPAN
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> system-based operating systems (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, etc.).</P
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><P
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>For further information (articles) on the <SPAN
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CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
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>UNIX</SPAN
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> tools philosophy please see the further reading section, here: <A
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HREF="further-reading.html#UNIX-TOOLS-FURTHER-READING"
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>Section A.2.2.1</A
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></P
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><P
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></P
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></DIV
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><DIV
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CLASS="NAVFOOTER"
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><HR
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ALIGN="LEFT"
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WIDTH="100%"><TABLE
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SUMMARY="Footer navigation table"
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CELLPADDING="0"
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CELLSPACING="0"
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><TR
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><TD
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WIDTH="33%"
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ALIGN="left"
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VALIGN="top"
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><A
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HREF="license.html"
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ACCESSKEY="P"
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>Prev</A
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></TD
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><TD
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WIDTH="34%"
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ALIGN="center"
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VALIGN="top"
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><A
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HREF="index.html"
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>Home</A
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ALIGN="right"
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><A
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HREF="shell-tips.html"
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ACCESSKEY="N"
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>Next</A
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></TD
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></TR
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><TR
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><TD
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WIDTH="33%"
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ALIGN="left"
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VALIGN="top"
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>License</TD
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><TD
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WIDTH="34%"
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ALIGN="center"
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VALIGN="top"
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> </TD
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><TD
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WIDTH="33%"
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ALIGN="right"
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VALIGN="top"
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|
>Shell Tips</TD
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></TR
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></TABLE
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></DIV
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></BODY
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></HTML
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>
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