[TUHS] [tuhs] The Unix shell: a 50-year view

Noel Hunt noel.hunt at gmail.com
Mon Jul 5 11:33:46 AEST 2021


> But note that when wnj wrote head(1), Joy followed the
> famous `Unix Philosophy' of  doing one (small) job
> well.   Which means he did not add a feature *i.e.*
> abusing, an old program, like cat(1), and add some new
> switch to it that that told the program stop outputting
> after n lines.  Instead Joy wrote a simple new tool.

He didn't need to abuse any existing program by adding new
flags or the like; unless I am mistaken, `sed Nq', for some
number `N', does exactly what `head -N' would do on a single
file, obviating the very need for head(1).

>
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