I have not done an strace. I did try a much larger dataset, and the speed advantage does decrease. Test files - number and total size: $ ls *.xz | wc -l

I have not done an strace. I did try a much larger dataset, and the speed advantage does decrease. Test files - number and total size: $ ls *.xz | wc -l 59908 $ du -b *.xz | awk '{s += $1}; END {print s}' 444456636 $ echo $((444456636 /1024 /1024)) 423 Dash trial: # head -1 /usr/bin/xzgrep #!/bin/dash # time xzgrep 1234567 *.xz 2> /dev/null ... real 16m41.275s user 8m50.386s sys 11m0.066s # time xzgrep 1234567 *.xz 2> /dev/null ... real 16m1.004s user 8m41.904s sys 10m45.139s Bash trial: # vi /usr/bin/xzgrep # head -1 /usr/bin/xzgrep #!/bin/sh # time xzgrep 1234567 *.xz 2> /dev/null ... real 21m53.975s user 7m23.522s sys 22m10.284s p.s. The wrapper script fails for filenames that have spaces. It could definitely use some developer attention.