Philosophy of Linix-ish Environments

Linux-ish environments have a dominant theme: Many small, general utilities are better than a few monolithic ones. Most naive users perceive that there are many commands, all of which seem to do very little. This is correct! It's a feature, not a bug! What frequently eludes new users is the power that many small utilities has. For example, suppose one manages a web site and would like to see the number of hits from machines not in the wustl.edu domain, sorted by decreasing frequency. httpd logs contain lines of the form:
machine - - [date] "GET url" ...

The following pipeline does just what we want:

$ cut -f1 -d' ' /local/httpd/logs/access_log \
  | grep -v 'wustl\.edu' \
  | sort \
  | uniq -c \
  | sort -rn \
  | head -7
    851 crawl4.atext.com
    507 cybers65d18.mt.wave.shaw.ca
    427 scooter.pa-x.dec.com
    224 chris.arach-net.com
    136 206.187.18.239
    124 gw.envision.com
    110 www.st-charles-net.com
$