>The other point is that GNU utils are self-contained binaries and don't usually include transitive dependencies 20 levels deep. Mostly because UNIX programs d

>The other point is that GNU utils are self-contained binaries and don't usually include transitive dependencies 20 levels deep. Mostly because UNIX programs don't actually call other programs all that much. Composability happens on the shell level, but not so much in the program code level. e.g. The implementation of 'cat -n' isn't 'cat | pr -n' or the equivalent C, and pr usually isn't in a separate package from cat.