Linux and the Unix Philosophy

He grimaced. “You’re killing too many trees. Come to my office.”

He went straight to his terminal and proceeded to give me a lesson on

Unix I’ll never forget.

The point he made was this: Once you have printed your data on paper,

you have largely lost the ability to manipulate it any further. Data on paper

cannot be sorted, moved, filtered, transformed, modified, or anything else as

easily as it can on a computer. You cannot search it at the touch of a key. It

cannot be encrypted to protect sensitive information.

Do you remember earlier when we said that data that doesn’t move is

dead data? Paper poses a similar problem for your data. It’s simply not ...