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

[Ian G Batten]

In article <1991Jan14.202053.20054 at zoo.toronto.edu> henry at zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
> Incidentally, it turns out that one can often rewrite Berkeley or AT&T
> C programs as shell files and find that they run *faster*.

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.

Script started on Tue Jan 15 09:27:34 1991
$ time sum /unix
23454 2098 /unix

real        3.2
user        2.3
sys         0.8
$ time ./csm /unix
23454 2098

real        1.1
user        0.3
sys         0.7
$ 
script done on Tue Jan 15 09:27:53 1991

Other commands are as bad.  [[ This on a machine using gcc as the only
compiler, as well! ]]

ian