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Full Discussion: question from a dummy
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers question from a dummy Post 302086813 by blowtorch on Sunday 27th of August 2006 09:52:20 PM
Old 08-27-2006
Your question is answered here. Infact, read the entire book: The Art of Unix Programming.

Here's the excerpt that answers your question, by the way:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Doug McIlroy
(i) Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features.

(ii) Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don't clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don't insist on interactive input.

(iii) Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don't hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.

(iv) Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you've finished using them.

He later summarized it this way (quoted in A Quarter Century of Unix [Salus]):

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.
If you want to know who Doug McIlroy is, well, he was the guy who 'invented' unix pipes... though Ken Thompson actually put them in the kernel.
 

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DPKG-RECONFIGURE(8)						      Debconf						       DPKG-RECONFIGURE(8)

NAME
dpkg-reconfigure - reconfigure an already installed package SYNOPSIS
dpkg-reconfigure [options] packages DESCRIPTION
dpkg-reconfigure reconfigures packages after they have already been installed. Pass it the names of a package or packages to reconfigure. It will ask configuration questions, much like when the package was first installed. If you just want to see the current configuration of a package, see debconf-show(1) instead. OPTIONS
-ftype, --frontend=type Select the frontend to use. The default frontend can be permanently changed by: dpkg-reconfigure debconf Note that if you normally have debconf set to use the noninteractive frontend, dpkg-reconfigure will use the dialog frontend instead, so you actually get to reconfigure the package. -pvalue, --priority=value Specify the minimum priority of question that will be displayed. dpkg-reconfigure normally shows low priority questions no matter what your default priority is. See debconf(7) for a list. --default-priority Use whatever the default priority of question is, instead of forcing the priority to low. -u, --unseen-only By default, all questions are shown, even if they have already been answered. If this parameter is set though, only questions that have not yet been seen will be asked. --force Force dpkg-reconfigure to reconfigure a package even if the package is in an inconsistent or broken state. Use with caution. --no-reload Prevent dpkg-reconfigure from reloading templates. Use with caution; this will prevent dpkg-reconfigure from repairing broken templates databases. However, it may be useful in constrained environments where rewriting the templates database is expensive. -h, --help Display usage help. SEE ALSO
debconf(7) AUTHOR
Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> 2018-02-28 DPKG-RECONFIGURE(8)
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