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by dijit 500 days ago
> “ Write programs that handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.”

—Douglas McIlroy

Its difficult to pinpoint a single origin of “everything is a file”, but its referenced in Kernighans memoirs, which is a good read: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/memoir.html
1 comments
gf000 500 days ago
Yeah, such a tool will be definitely stable and portable! Until you change the locale and the whole thing breaks apart, with no error message whatsoever..

Also, not even Linux believed in "everything is a file". Everything is either a file or a stream. The two is not the same.

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dijit 500 days ago
The parent asked a specific question so I gave an answer.

If you disagree that text streams are a good universal medium then thats totally valid, but then perhaps don’t use a unix-like and go for something like VMS, VAX or Windows.

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