Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sdd.hp.com!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!jpl-devvax!lwall
From: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: edit first line of long file
Message-ID: <10096@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Date: 24 Oct 90 18:40:21 GMT
References: <4597:Oct2321:44:2190@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <590@inews.intel.com> <10201:Oct2404:23:3890@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <600@inews.intel.com>
Reply-To: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
Lines: 17

In article <600@inews.intel.com> bhoughto@cmdnfs.intel.com (Blair P. Houghton) writes:
: (And you really should try perl.  I've done things like
: this in what I thought was super-tight C code that Larry
: Wall then did in three lines of perl; the C took 7 seconds
: in one case and the perl took 3.  It might even out-cat cat.)

Probably not, but it depends on how smart your stdio is, and how dumb
your cat is.  And of course, it depends on how you write your cat
equivalent--the recent addition of direct read and write system calls
to Perl could make it a close runner-up in the catting category, but
then Sun's cat plays tricks with mmap to do even better, I believe.

Of course, you could call syscall(&SYS_mmap, ...) from Perl...

Erk.

Larry