Re: Commenting and large pipelines

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In addition to what Lawrence said ...

On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 11:35 PM Zach Riggle <zachriggle@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>     3. Is the use of {} better than ()?

In most cases it won't matter.  Putting something on the left side of
a pipe in zsh already starts it in a subshell, and most such subshells
are subject to an optimization such that zsh will exec the last
command to replace the shell process.

On the right side of a pipe, however commands in { } stay in the
current shell whereas those in ( ) run in a forked subshell.

>     4. How much of a performance hit does this make, versus hand-writing a different pipeline?

It's definitely going to perform better than a pipeline built by
assigning and expanding array parameters.  Otherwise the performance
difference should be minimal.

>     5. Are there any ways to improve this?  For example, replacing 'cat' in the default case.

You're not going to do better than "cat" in that context.