Traditionally, Unix has operated by piping between commands ("find | grep | sort | uniq"). I wonder if we are experiencing a shift to command composition being a more common model?

I started thinking about this when I considered the following command line:

chronic mr run git annex get

Unpacking, that uses chronic, which arranges for quiet running of mr (unless it fails, then it shows the full output), which in turn runs git in every repository it knows about, and git is asked to run the git-annex subcommand, which in turn has a "get" subcommand of its own.

So, in other words, this is a cron job that syncs large files in a set of git repos, quietly. You might want to make it run niced also, which adds 3 more commands:

chronic nice ionice -c3 trickle -d100 mr run git annex get

This is the most extreme example I know of (unless you tack in a "sudo"), but there does seem to have been a gradual shift to using more composition, and more subcommands. In git in particular, two-levels of subcommands is not unknown, for example "git remote add". Subcommands, especially as implemented in git (or earlier, in arch), are kind of a special case of command composition that adds a namespace. I'm sure that a count of commands with subcommands would show it exploded in the past 10-12 years. I'll bet a count of composable commands would also show a significant increase.

Anyone have other examples of long compositions of commands?