The reason while read
is so slow is that the shell is required to make a system call for every byte. It cannot read a large buffer from the pipe, because the shell must not read more than one line from the input stream and therefore must compare each character against a newline. If you run strace
on a while read
loop, you can see this behavior. This behavior is desirable, because it makes it possible to reliably do things like:
while read size; do test "$size" -gt 0 || break; dd bs="$size" count=1 of=file$(( i++ )); done
in which the commands inside the loop are reading from the same stream that the shell reads from. If the shell consumed a big chunk of data by reading large buffers, the inner commands would not have access to that data. An unfortunate side-effect is that read
is absurdly slow.