6 ms·

the overhead isn't even an extra fork, as it uses exec

• hnlmorg 4y ago
  Good point. Though invoking $SHELL and parsing the script (as short as it is) can't be cheap either. Academically speaking of course; I'm not trying to justify the change on performance grounds.
• txutxu 4y ago
  On most context involving "using grep", shell scripts, interactive shell, etc, it's nothing. 81 Vs 128 system calls on my laptop (just printing --version) $ strace -fc grep -E --version 2>&1 | tail -1 100.00 0.000000 0 81 3 total $ strace -fc egrep --version 2>&1 | tail -1 100.00 0.000000 0 128 6 total Measured with "time" 0m0.002s Vs 0m0.003s, always, testing 4 times each option. Most situations where it could be being used, probably are surrounded by much bigger optimizations to work on.
  • tomn 4y ago
    true. using hyperfine on my machine shows that grep is about 2x faster than egrep (and yeah, still nothing, 1.5 vs. 3ms)