The growth of command line options

1 · Dan Luu · March 3, 2020, 12:15 p.m.
My hobby: opening up McIlroy’s UNIX philosophy on one monitor while reading manpages on the other. The first of McIlroy's dicta is often paraphrased as "do one thing and do it well", which is shortened from "Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new 'features.'" McIlroy's example of this dictum is: Surprising to outsiders is the fact that UNIX compilers produce no listings: printing can be done better and more flexibly b...