Ya know, if you are looking for optimization opportunities, using a temporary file to communicate between processes rather than using an actual pipe, is definitely a performance hit -- ESPECIALLY on Cygwin, where you can't even do a "stat" call on a file without actually opening the file.
I seem to remember a few months back mentioning this inefficiency and how in some environments, using a tmp file (say booting from a read-only media, and having no writable, temporary, storage) might not just be slow, but fail to work. Some were sure a startup script I was working on at the time, was running into problems with TMP not being writable on linux. So in addition to fixing a performance issue on Cygwin, using pipes for communication could actually make bash work in more places where it might not otherwise. I didn't get the impression that you were willing to look for issues to improve bash's performance or improve bash's robustness at that time. Just thought I'd refresh your memory, if you were open to looking at areas where algorithmic improvement would be likely to result in increased performance and robustness... :-) Linda Chet Ramey wrote:
It's not a bug; it's an opportunity for optimization. It's like this because it hasn't come up as a performance problem. I'll take a look at it. There are probably several opportunities like this. Chet
