Well, my analysis applies if cat uses "stdio.h" to read the file (which probably depends on the breed of cat that you have).

But that doesn't matter in this case because even if cat is faster than Perl, Perl would still have to read the output from cat. So X+Y is always bigger than just Y (since a process can't consume negative resources), whether X<Y or Y<X.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")