The core Unix philosophy:

Build small programs that do one thing well, make them work together, and communicate through simple text streams.

Common principles:

  • Do one thing well.
  • Compose tools using pipes and standard input/output.
  • Use text as a universal interface where practical.
  • Keep programs simple, modular, and replaceable.
  • Prefer clear interfaces over monolithic systems.

Tools like grep, sort, uniq, awk, and sed are powerful not because each does everything, but because they combine cleanly.