A very nice overview. Now knowing all this isn't necessarily a prerequisite for getting a lot of stuff done, but I think it's very useful indeed. In my experience in the industry so far I find that most people don't know any of this and just implicitly rely on the magic going on underneath and just interact with higher level interfaces, but when things go wrong then they're stuck and rely on Google or Stack Overflow for answers, copy and pasting solutions without really knowing why it works. This is fine of course, some people might not be too interested in this aspect, and just want to solve that blocker and move on with their task, but for me it's essential.
This is a very good explanation. However, I think it would have been helpful if the author had provided some comparisons with how other operating systems do these sorts of things, and why its designers made their particular choices for Unix. Or maybe that could be another article he could link to.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 27.0 ms ] threadHe said "Let’s start at the core - the philosophy behind Unix.
Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
Write programs to work together. (no extra output, don’t insist on interactive input)
Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.
" So ? How does UNIX really work ?