Exactly. On a modern computer, the gain from not piping cats is almost always negligible. I don't think most shell scripts today ever get to the point where you

Exactly. On a modern computer, the gain from not piping cats is almost always negligible. I don't think most shell scripts today ever get to the point where you have to worry about inner loops and the such. These days, if you hit a performance wall from spawning too many cats, I would think you switch to some scripting language where you have everything in one process. Premature optimization, people...