That would depend upon the shell that you used. GNU Bash in particular is not known for speed, although this is just a question of pipes. I remember that cdrec

That would depend upon the shell that you used. GNU Bash in particular is not known for speed, although this is just a question of pipes. I remember that cdrecord has explict advice on raising pipe buffer size to avoid an underun (that will render a CD unusable). Perhaps pipe tuning here might also impact performance. I don't know if dash will increase performance in this particular case. $ rpm -qi dash | tail -3 DASH is a POSIX-compliant implementation of /bin/sh that aims to be as small as possible. It does this without sacrificing speed where possible. In fact, it is significantly faster than bash (the GNU Bourne-Again SHell) for most tasks.