The designers of the UNIX operating system described the ideal shell command language as one that is made up of a large set of simple commands, each designed to perform one specialized task well. They also provided various means to combine these simple commands to form more powerful commands.

a. What tools are provided to combine the commands?

b. What are the advantages of this approach over providing a smaller set of much more powerful commands? What are the disadvantages?

c. If you know something about the UNIX or Linux command set, discuss the characteristics of UNIX/Linux commands that make it easier to combine these commands powerfully.