[SunHELP] insert one line at beginning of text file; efficiently

[Phil Stracchino]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 05:45:20PM -0400, Dale Ghent wrote:
> On Wednesday, September 3, 2003, at 05:21 PM, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> >Don't you think it's a bit wasteful starting up a whole Perl 
> >interpreter
> >to do something this trivial?
> 
> What is it wasting, exactly? Gas? Trees? Water? Air?

CPU time and process space which, if this is handling events that are
being generated at a high rate, could become pretty significant.  The
actual processing required to do this task, especially with a "cached"
blank line in a preexisting file, is tiny compared to the overhead of
firing up a Perl interpreter to handle *each request*.  But if I
understood the original poster correctly, a shell is already running.
The overhead of a single cat executed by that existing shell is
miniscule.


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