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Top Forums UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users Which cut command is more efficient? Post 302507397 by methyl on Wednesday 23rd of March 2011 06:01:56 PM
Old 03-23-2011
@Corona688
Yes, 36 cores (9x4). CPU power not an issue. Regularly running over 30,000 concurrent processes.

Bottleneck on reading large files is invariably the disc system, closely followed by the software. This is where reading moderate size files with "cat" scores over the read function in some unix utilities. I recognise that "cut" is actually one of the better ones.

For the advanced user with large data files I am not averse to using "dd" or "cpio" (or both) to read from the disc in an optimum manner.

On a single core system running ancient unix it was very important to minimise the number of concurrent processes. This is really not the case nowadays unless you happen to be running unix on a home system.

Back to the O/P.
The conventional answer is that running more processes is less efficient. On a modern large system with multiple processors (i.e. the norm) it can be more efficient to run a pipeline of multiple efficient processes than to run a single inefficient process.
The "Useless use of cat" brigade have clearly never used a modern computer where apparent inefficiencies are in fact covered by proper utilisation of the software and hardware as a team.
By applying lateral thought we can deduce that hardware design evolution is actually targetted towards making inefficient processes efficient. We can take advantage of that by tactical use of the previously-inefficent processes.

Nuff said.

Last edited by methyl; 03-23-2011 at 07:07 PM.. Reason: spellin, verbosity
 

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vfork(2)							System Calls Manual							  vfork(2)

Name
       vfork - spawn new process in a virtual memory-efficient way

Syntax
       pid = vfork()
       int pid;

Description
       The  can  be used to create new processes without fully copying the address space of the old process, which is inefficient in a paged envi-
       ronment.  It is useful when the purpose of would have been to create a new system context for an The system call differs from in  that  the
       child borrows the parent's memory and thread of control until a call to or an exit (either by a call to or abnormally.)	The parent process
       is suspended while the child is using its resources.

       The system call returns a value of zero (0) in the child's context and, later, the pid of the child in the parent's context.

       The system call can normally be used just like It does not work, however, to return while running in the childs context from the  procedure
       which  called because the eventual return from would then return to a nonexistent stack frame.  Be careful, also, to call _exit rather than
       exit if you cannot call because exit will flush and close standard I/O channels and thereby cause problems in the parent process's standard
       I/O data structures.  Even with it is wrong to call exit, because buffered data would then be flushed twice.

Restrictions
       To avoid a possible deadlock situation, processes which are children in the middle of a are never sent SIGTTOU or SIGTTIN signals.  Rather,
       output or ioctls are allowed, and input attempts result in an end-of-file indication.

Diagnostics
       Same as for

See Also
       execve(2), fork(2), sigvec(2), wait(2)

																	  vfork(2)
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