Surprisingly relevant?

Posted May 20, 2020 20:29 UTC (Wed) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: Surprisingly relevant? by marduk
Parent article: The state of the AWK

> where spawning a bunch of processes to do what awk can do by itself is acceptable to you.

Why do I care? I have gigabytes of RAM and it's not like I'm going to run out of PIDs from a five-command pipeline. Besides, the kernel should be COWing glibc etc. so it's not even all that much overhead to begin with. If you're using something like Toybox/Busybox/whatever-other-box-is-popular-these-days, then you can literally COW the entire executable.

Surprisingly relevant?

Posted Nov 19, 2020 13:29 UTC (Thu) by nenad_noveljic (guest, #143180) [Link]

Forking is an expensive OS call. It might cause a problem when used occasionally in the command line. But it will consume substantial kernel CPU if done on a large scale.