But I like my colorized match: grep --color ... Also grep -n is so much nicer than something like awk '{print NR "," $0}' Finally, I think grep must be faster

But I like my colorized match: grep --color ... Also grep -n is so much nicer than something like awk '{print NR "," $0}' Finally, I think grep must be faster if only because grep doesn't line buffer by default, although you may --line-buffered.