On 14/03/07, John Summerfield <debian at herakles.homelinux.org> wrote: > Ryan Simpkins wrote: > > > > Am I using time right to measure it? > No, you're timing the cat only. I don't think that's the case, you know. If I run the following: [wmcdonald at stella ~]$ ls -lh /tmp/messages.1 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4.3M Mar 14 20:03 /tmp/messages.1 [wmcdonald at stella ~]$ time cat /tmp/messages.1 1> /dev/null real 0m0.018s user 0m0.001s sys 0m0.017s [wmcdonald at stella ~]$ time cat /tmp/messages.1 | grep '*.foo' 1> /dev/null real 0m0.047s user 0m0.021s sys 0m0.026s Running both commands repeatedly shows similar time differences, I think 'time''s timing the execution time of the whole command. Will.