Sponsored Content
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.
 

10 More Discussions You Might Find Interesting

1. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Unix dummy's question

:confused: Hi, 2 questions to get some insight. Thanks (1) I would like to add a prefix (XX00) in each row of the line in my text file and save a newly generated file another name. How to go about it. (2) How to insert a blank line into each row in my file. and save the file another name.... (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: merry susana
2 Replies

2. Filesystems, Disks and Memory

A simple dummy question

Hello Everyone! changing from Microsoft to Macintosh, I connected my hard disk (nearly full) to the apple computer, which could not recognize it. I was prompt to "initialize it", unfortunately I DECIDED YES!!, but just for 1/100 of a second: now I cannot access the hard disk at all. Is still... (1 Reply)
Discussion started by: NETTO68
1 Replies

3. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

cut awk dummy question :)

how to make cut and awk treat "a b" as a single column rather then two separate columns "a and b"? how to remove " symbol from "a b" so there is only a b? Please help Regards Karol (14 Replies)
Discussion started by: sopel39
14 Replies

4. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Dummy question about /proc/cpuinfo

Perhaps this is a very dummy question but sorry I don't know other place to do it. We just buy a new cluster of Xeon machines but there is something I don't understand and perhaps someone can help me. The more /proc/cpuinfo produces the following output (just part of it). processor : 0... (1 Reply)
Discussion started by: jhc
1 Replies

5. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

a dummy question...needs help...

I am trying to use 'cut' to get a line from my file. But it seems that 'cut' recongnizes TAB as default. My file uses space instead. So 'cut' doesn't work. Anybody can tell me how to change the default from TAB to space ? Or how to transform a space-delimited file into tab-delimited file??... (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: kaixinsjtu
2 Replies

6. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

dummy question on data process

I have a file which contains 6 columns. But I only need the first 3 columns. So I need to remove the last 3 columns. I checked 'cut' but it seems not working. So is there a command that could remove certain columns from a file? :( Thanks a lot!! (5 Replies)
Discussion started by: kaixinsjtu
5 Replies

7. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

a dummy question on data processing

Hi, everyone, I have a matrix, let's say: 1 2 3 4 5 6 ... 4 5 6 7 8 9 ... 7 8 9 1 2 3 ... 3 4 5 6 7 8 ... ......... (nxm matrix) Is there a simple command that can take certain specific rows out of the matrix? e.g., I want to take row 2 (4 5 6 7 8 9 ...) and row 4 (3 4 5 6 7 8... (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: kaixinsjtu
2 Replies

8. IP Networking

DNS dummy question

Hello everyone, I have a some doubt about DNS. We have connected to 2 ISPs /ISP#1 and ISP#2/. Our web site's dns zone is located on ISP#1. If connection to ISP#1 is down clients won't find our website. ISP#1 connection went down few times this month. So we are going to create our website's... (0 Replies)
Discussion started by: sembii
0 Replies

9. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Dummy question on awk

Hi, I have a file which has three columns and 200 rows. I would like to print an extra column say "disco" for every 10 th row starting from 4 th row. How is that possible? Thnx (4 Replies)
Discussion started by: Indra2011
4 Replies

10. UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

Dummy Question

Where can I get UNIX? (1 Reply)
Discussion started by: ciao303
1 Replies
HXCOUNT(1)							  HTML-XML-utils							HXCOUNT(1)

NAME
hxcount - count elements and attributes in HTML or XML files SYNOPSIS
hxcount [ file-or-URL ] DESCRIPTION
The hxcount command counts the number of elements and attributes of each type that appears in the input and prints a report on stdout. OPERANDS
The following operand is supported: file-or-URL The name or URL of an HTML or XML file. If absent, standard input is read instead. EXIT STATUS
The following exit values are returned: 0 Successful completion. > 0 An error occurred in the parsing of the HTML or XML file. hxcount will try to recover from the error and produce output anyway. ENVIRONMENT
To use a proxy to retrieve remote files, set the environment variables http_proxy and ftp_proxy. E.g., http_proxy="http://localhost:8080/" BUGS
Don't trust the output if there were errors in the input. Remote files (specified with a URL) are currently only supported for HTTP. Password-protected files or files that depend on HTTP "cookies" are not handled. (You can use tools such as curl(1) or wget(1) to retrieve such files.) SEE ALSO
asc2xml(1), hxprune(1), hxnormalize(1), hxnum(1), hxtoc(1), hxunent(1), xml2asc(1), UTF-8 (RFC 2279) 6.x 10 Jul 2011 HXCOUNT(1)
All times are GMT -4. The time now is 04:07 PM.
Unix & Linux Forums Content Copyright 1993-2022. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy