In the shell, and in UNIX and Linux in general, fork and exec are relatively expensive operations. So:

Code:

find . -type f -name name

is more efficient than:

Code:

find . -type f | grep name

unless there is some reason to believe that grep is so much faster at processing a regular expression to match a filename than find that the overhead needed to write many more filenames into a pipe, fork and exec grep, and have grep read those filenames from the pipe, and perform the same regexp processing that find would have performed; doing it all in find will use fewer processes, pass less data between processes, and use less system memory than using find and grep to do the same work.

On systems that don't have find -print0 and xargs -0, piping a list of filenames that might contain whitespace and/or quote characters is not only less efficient, it is somewhere between harder and impossible to reconstruct the filenames that need to be processed while there is absolutely no problem figuring what filename should be used in find -exec command '{}' + and in find -exec command '{}' other operands \;.

That is why it is usually much more efficient to do all of the processing in find that you can do in find instead of firing up multiple processes in a pipeline to do the same work.