Actually, mixing sysread with tachyon's buffer/partial line code (I did say mine sucked. :-)) is the fastest so far.

Got it down to 2 wallclocks. Tachyon's implementation as written (chunk size and all) came in at 4 wall clocks. Didn't mess with chunk size however.

However, even with removing his this/that, the output I am getting is slightly different, but must sleep. The clowns are coming for me.