My original phrasing may have been unclear; with the elision you made the thrust becomes quite different. I intended to convey two thoughts: that Useless Use o

My original phrasing may have been unclear; with the elision you made the thrust becomes quite different. I intended to convey two thoughts: that Useless Use of Cat and other filters is pervasive because it is so easy, and secondly, that spawning tons of unnecessary processes is a common performance waste. The specific example with just three processes (cat, grep, awk) is not such a big deal--the bad cases are when stuff like that happens within loops (but the performance loss is not due to the loops, but rather the spawning).