If true, I'll leave credit to that insight to you since I was not thinking in terms of functional programming. I don't know enough about functional programming

If true, I'll leave credit to that insight to you since I was not thinking in terms of functional programming. I don't know enough about functional programming to assess whether it is true, but piping data through the classic Unix utilities does seem to meet at least one criteria of functional programming (e.g. the utilities act as pure functions).