That was always little more than unix propaganda. Until GNU came around and held itself to a higher standard, it was common for unix tools to do bullshit like read input into fixed length line buffers and silently truncate anything longer (when they weren't overtly crashing). "Do it well", hardly. A more true to life account of "unix philosophy" is "worse is better". It doesn't have to be good, merely available.
GNU programs do lots of things poorly, starting with "echo -e" and "cat -n" and continuing through to tools like awk and sed. Powershell does Unix philosophy better than GNU does.
It’s still a relatively decent and ambitious thing to aspire to, i.e. a lean interface/tool scope that prevents scope creep. Composability (with pipelines) also works quite well. But yes, it is somewhat propaganda.
> it was common for unix tools to do bullshit like read input into fixed length line buffers and silently truncate anything longer (when they weren't overtly crashing).
You might want to remind yourself what caused the November 2025 Cloudflare outage!
