🚀 go-pugleaf

   Whether the optimization is worth putting in depends on how often
   people use wc -c, I guess.

The unsharing process, among others, makes frequent use of `wc -c'.
The `wc -c' usage which originated this thread was a `ddsplit' script
(for a particular machine where I may not install GNU split) where I
needed to know the overall size of a big file for computing the number
of resulting pieces.  It happened that the "size=`wc -c $input`" line
was taking a fair amount of real time.  Being curious, I just checked
how GNU wc would behave on the same problem and discovered it was not
as fast as I would have expected.

I think GNU wc should be made faster, would it be only for the
principle that GNU programs should do the best/proper thing in all
circumstances :-).

				Keep all happy!

-- 
Franc,ois Pinard        ``Vivement GNU!''        pinard@iro.umontreal.ca
(514) 588-4656                                    ...!uunet!iros1!pinard
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