187 lines
3.8 KiB
HTML
187 lines
3.8 KiB
HTML
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>The Unix Tools Philosophy</TITLE
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NAME="THE-UNIX-TOOLS-PHILOSOPHY"
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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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> </TD
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