SVR3 Utilities (Was: Re: small bug in who(1) of SVR3)

[John F Haugh II]

In article <BW2^?6- at uzi-9mm.fulcrum.bt.co.uk> igb at fulcrum.bt.co.uk (Ian G Batten) writes:
>I don't doubt it.  I had to use ``sum'' in a small utility and was
>shocked at its performance.  When I rewrote it as a function --- rather
>than running it down a pipe --- and removed some obvious infelicitudes
>it ran about three times faster.  That with, oh, half an hour's effort.

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.  Of course,
on a system with a load average <1, waste is just fine.

% timex who -q
jfh jfh jfh root 
# users=4
execution complete

real	         0.18
user	         0.02
sys	         0.08
% timex users
jfh root
execution complete

real	         0.19
user	         0.00
sys	         0.05
% timex /bin/sh -c 'who | cut -d" " -f1 | sort -u | tr \\012 " " ; echo ""'
jfh root 
execution complete

real	         0.79
user	         0.02
sys	         0.22
-- 
John F. Haugh II                             UUCP: ...!cs.utexas.edu!rpp386!jfh
Ma Bell: (512) 832-8832                           Domain: jfh at rpp386.cactus.org
"While you are here, your wives and girlfriends are dating handsome American
 movie and TV stars. Stars like Tom Selleck, Bruce Willis, and Bart Simpson."