For something somewhat related, see parts of this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14414610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14414610 Note tha

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").