Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan warned about this trend in their seminal paper "Program Design in the UNIX Environment" (also known as "cat -v considered harmful"

Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan warned about this trend in their seminal paper "Program Design in the UNIX Environment" (also known as "cat -v considered harmful" which describes how proper unix programs should be designed: http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/ http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/