Something which the shell script has which the go implementation lacks (unless I missed it) is concurrency. When you have a shell pipeline like 'cmd1 | cmd2 | c

Something which the shell script has which the go implementation lacks (unless I missed it) is concurrency. When you have a shell pipeline like 'cmd1 | cmd2 | cmd3' those cmds are actually started at the same time and run in parallel. This is really great for performance - you get multiple cores working on the problem with very little effort.