Design Philosophy

The off-line processing software is based on a UNIX design philosophy which is well summarized below.

``...at its heart is the idea that the power of a system comes more from the relationships among programs than from the programs themselves. Many UNIX programs do quite trivial tasks in isolation, but, combined with other programs, become general useful tools.'' Kernighan and Pike, The UNIX Programming Environment

In the context of the off-line analysis, programs are kept relatively simple and are specialized to perform specific tasks. The output of these programs is often used as the input to other programs and can be easily manipulated by standard utilities and scripting languages. Finally, because programs perform relatively simple tasks, they are easy to control, usually with a set of command line options in a fashion similar to the UNIX command set. An understanding of this philosophy will help you better understand the design decisions made in the off-line analysis scheme, especially the off-line processing script.