The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Tenet 02 — Transforming Data Streams
Author's note: This article is excerpted in part from chapter 4 of my book, The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, with some changes. My article about...
The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Tenet 01 — Data Streams, the universal interface
Everything in Linux revolves around streams of data – particularly text streams.
I recently Googled “data stream” and most of the top hits are concerned with processing huge amounts of streaming data in single entities such as streaming video and audio, or financial institutions processing streams consisting of huge numbers of individual transactions. This is not what we are talking about here although the concept is the same and a case could be made that current applications use the stream processing functions of Linux as the model for processing many types of data.