Well, sometimes using cat is faster, as I discovered to my surprise recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14414610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?i

Well, sometimes using cat is faster, as I discovered to my surprise recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14414610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14414610 But in that case one could probably say that Gnu awk is just not very good at input handling (as Mawk doesn't appear to benefit from an extra "cat").