Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!rpi!sci.ccny.cuny.edu!phri!cmcl2!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.bugs.sys5
Subject: Re: SVR3 Utilities (Was: Re: small bug in who(1) of SVR3)
Message-ID: <14862@smoke.brl.mil>
Date: 15 Jan 91 21:46:30 GMT
References: <1991Jan14.202053.20054@zoo.toronto.edu> <BW2^?6-@uzi-9mm.fulcrum.bt.co.uk> <18948@rpp386.cactus.org>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 10

In article <18948@rpp386.cactus.org> jfh@rpp386.cactus.org (John F Haugh II) writes:
>Well, I do doubt it.  Here is a collection of examples.  It should be
>obvious that the pipe loses out over the single C command.

Sure, running the general merge-sort utility sure slows it down.
But 'who|wc -l' is so close in performance on this (relatively puny)
system that it would take a practically infinite number of invocations
before it would repay the resources that would have to be spent to
install the special-purpose who -q hack.  That, after all, was the
point of the comments against such hacks.