8 May
2017
8 May
'17
12:50 a.m.
On 7May 2017, at 2:19 PM, Doug McIlroy
<doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
Not genius. Experience.
It’s the pipe that was genius. When I first heard the idea, I thought it was
preposterous. My
programs’ outputs were designed for the line printer, with carriage control characters.
How
could this idea be useful?
These tools are powerful--I co-founded a company out of network probe software mostly
designed
around filters. And it scales beautifully to multi-core computing. I had movie
visualization software
suddenly nearly double in speed one day. They had doubled the number of CPUs in the
ferric cluster.
My favorite filter: the unsort (or scramble) command.
Honeyman’s “idiom” command:
sort | uniq -c | sort -rn