Perhaps not a fair comparison until you account for the C library's string comparison behaviors. If your default is LANG=C.UTF-8, your wc may be a bunch slower

Perhaps not a fair comparison until you account for the C library's string comparison behaviors. If your default is LANG=C.UTF-8, your wc may be a bunch slower than LANG=C. I think OSX is still using gnu wc, yes? Maybe the Dialog race should be repeated with this controlled for. https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1sxpgp/make_grep_50x_faster/ https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1sxpgp/make_gr... Edit. Still true in Linux today. $ LANG=C time -p wc /tmp/foo 2>&1 >/dev/null real 0.29 user 0.28 sys 0.01 $ LANG=C.UTF-8 time -p wc /tmp/foo 2>&1 >/dev/null real 0.86 user 0.86 sys 0.00