Re: [dev] s - suckless shell

From: Ben Woolley <tautolog_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2016 11:42:22 -0700

> On Aug 13, 2016, at 4:31 AM, Connor Lane Smith <cls_AT_lubutu.com> wrote:
>
> IO redirection being done by separate programs, though, seems like a
> wrong decision. Streaming the data through a separate process is
> considerably less efficient than just setting a file descriptor to an
> open file, and not always equivalent in behaviour either. For example,
> `tty < $TTY` is obviously very different to `cat $TTY | tty`. In my
> opinion this is a bug in your design, and needs to be fixed.
>

You make a good point about the effect, but I don't consider it a design flaw but a design effect. The same argument could be made for processes like grep. It would be much more efficient as a built-in, but it isn't a big deal most of the time. If we really want performance, we use another tool with built-in RE. Same case here: if I need to redirect gigabytes, I can use sh for that command.

There are ways to speed it up using zero-copy interfaces from the OS, but people don't even do that with grep because if you are using shell, you are already trading development time for efficiency.
Received on Sat Aug 13 2016 - 20:42:22 CEST