Well that speaks to the point I'm making. The people who suggested the original slow shell script, are well respected and talented shell programmers. And my "run-of-the-mill" Perl script, beat it. So when someone says, "why use Perl, I can do it faster with a shell script", you better think twice; because maybe the Perl is faster.

Also the optimized shell script only beat the Perl version by a nose, Considering how much more flexible the Perl script is, in processing the files as they are found, run-of-the-mill Perl is likely to be faster, than a run-of-the-mill shell, doing some equivalent task. Shell, with it's constant spawing of awk and sed, etc.; is probably harder to do at optimized speed, compared to Perl.