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Re:How is GNU `yes` so fast? by sqeaky on Tuesday June 13, 2017 @12:08PM (#14545831)
I was under the impression that cat automatically used a sane size for reading. Now that I think of it I cannot think of a source, other that to point out my own anecdotal experience.

When I was writing raspbian images to SD cards to use on a raspabery Cat and DD took within a few seconds of each other on an operation longer then a minute. Since then I have been using cat where I could, but I didn't think to right down the numbers though.

Re:How is GNU `yes` so fast? by e12e on Wednesday June 14, 2017 @06:33AM (#14551777)
For something somewhat related, see parts of this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14414610

Note that cat+gnu awk was faster than just gnu awk - but mawk was faster still (reading a not entirely small file).

And in a similar vein of gp comparing Gnu and Openbsd, note that openbsd cat is a little more convoluted than the simplest possible implementation (at least to my eyes):

https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/bin/cat/cat.c

https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/cat.c

(That is, Gnu "cat" and OpenBSD "cat" are less different than Gnu "yes" and OpenBSD "yes").