Why do Unix commands perform simple tasks rather than more complex ones?

Answer 1

the unix phylosophy is "do a single job correctly" . due to this the authors / creatorscreated unix commands simpler. to do complex tasks the simpler commands are combined. for example

head command is used to displasy the top ten or required number of lines from a file "file"

tail commandis used to displasy the lastten or required number of lines from a file "file"

but if i require to lines from 3rd line to 10th line i does not have the command to do this

i combine head & tail commands

head -10 file | tail -7

by

rami reddy

Answer 2

Unix has developed under the philosophy of keeping things simple. That is, complex tasks should be split into smaller tasks, each performed by a different program. Unix uses a concept of 'pipes,' where output from one program is fed into another for further processing. Consider the following example:

Let's say we need to count some votes stored in a text file. On each line there is a name. Each vote takes up one line; if "Jack" was voted 12 times, then 12 lines of the file will be "jack". Instead of writing a program to do this, we can break this up into small pieces. The logic required is as follows:

1. Sort the list in alphabetical order
2. Count how many times each name appears
3. Sort the result in descending numerical order

In Unix, this would be accomplished by the following commands:

1. sort
2. uniq -c
3. sort -rn

String these commands together, and you get:

$ sort | uniq -c | sort -rn