3 ms·

You're right of course; and actually I believe the kernel will simply provide as many bytes as the read() requested; so the speed should mostly depend on how yo

• sqeaky 9y ago
  I was under the impression that cat automatically used a sane size for reading. Now that I think of it I cannot think of a source, other that to point out my own anecdotal experience. When I was writing raspbian images to SD cards to use on a raspabery Cat and DD took within a few seconds of each other on an operation longer then a minute. Since then I have been using cat where I could, but I didn't think to right down the numbers though.
  • e12e 9y ago
    For something somewhat related, see parts of this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14414610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14414610 Note that cat+gnu awk was faster than just gnu awk - but mawk was faster still (reading a not entirely small file). And in a similar vein of gp comparing Gnu and Openbsd, note that openbsd cat is a little more convoluted than the simplest possible implementation (at least to my eyes): https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/bin/cat/cat.c https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/bin/cat/cat.c https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/cat.c https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/cat.c (That is, Gnu "cat" and OpenBSD "cat" are less different than Gnu "yes" and OpenBSD "yes").