Wikipedia1 cites a few different sources on what "Unix Philosophy" is. Peter Salus summarizes it as: 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. That second bullet point is my favorite: making composable programs rather than monolithic systems. In this way, Unix is designed to be a forge for easily building new tools. The first rule—writing programs that do one thing well—is...
