Toolbox, Filters and Piping are the key concepts at work here - the ability to chain together n number of programs to do what you want.

That is exactly what I was thinking. Take the classic Unix command line:

grep -i '^fred' $( ls f*.txt | fgrep -v 42 ) | sed -e's/Baltimore/Glen
+ Burnie/' | troff -mm -rN5 | lpr &
[download]

I count six different commands in that statement, and four take no arguments. The Unix philosophy of stringing together smaller utilities into a bigger tool encourage that sort of thing. DOS, which is still the basis of the Windows approach, has/had no such infrastructure to encourage this behavior. In fact, it probably discouraged it.

It's odd, but I see this affecting the approach to software that we take in my group at work vs another group that is all VB/Java. They mock and fear the command line, while those of us in the Unix world tend to think "Yeah, yeah, just because you don't understand it."

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