cat a > b
and
cp a b
If they are functionally the same for all intents and purposes, which one is faster?
Bash – difference between these two commands
bashcommand lineposix
bashcommand lineposix
cat a > b
and
cp a b
If they are functionally the same for all intents and purposes, which one is faster?
Best Answer
In terms of functionality I think they are the same.
If I had to venture a guess about which is faster, I would say the cp command because its purpose is to do file operations just for copy purposes, so it would be optimized for that.
cat, by contrast, is meant concatenate files, meaning joining several files into a series. If no file is specified, it will display a file to the console (thanks to @bahamat for reminding us). In this example the output is redirected to another file. I think this indirection would be less efficient than a direct
cp.I don't know if the difference would be noticeable for regular sized files, though it would be interesting to time these on very large files. I guess one could do repeated trials with /usr/bin/time and see if one is consistently faster/slower than the other.
Do you have any particular reason to ask about this, or is it just simple curiosity (nothing wrong with that at all of course)