It depends on what you're doing also. Once when I rewrote a third-party utility in perl, rewriting this bit caused it to go slower in perl:
grep "^function" *.4gl |
sed "s/\(.*\):function \(.*\)(.*/\2   \1      \/^function \2(/"

[download]
But the above was wrong, so I rewrote a "correct" perl version :
/^\s*function\s+(\w+)\s*\(/i
#  and then use hashes to save data so there's no s///

[download]
I rewrote the new perl version in shell (grep/sed) for kicks, and it was slower than the perl version (and much uglier).

In reply to Re: Myth busted: Shell isn't always faster than Perl by runrig
in thread Myth busted: Shell isn't always faster than Perl by zentara

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