Why does echo >file use more real time than echo | sed >file?

Question

The example, below, surprised me. It seems to be counter intuitive... aside from the fact that there is a whisker more user time for the echo | sed combo.

Why is echo using so much sys time when it runs alone, or should the question be, How does sed change the state of play? It seems that echo would needs to do the same echo-ing in both cases...

time echo -n a\ {1..1000000}\ c$'\n' >file

# real    0m9.481s
# user    0m5.304s
# sys     0m4.172s

time echo -n a\ {1..1000000}\ c$'\n' |sed s/^\ // >file

# real    0m5.955s
# user    0m5.488s
# sys     0m1.580s

Answer 1

bahamat and Alan Curry have it right: this is due to the way your shell buffers the output of echo. Specifically, your shell is bash, and it issues one write system call per line. Hence the first snippet makes 1000000 writes to a disk file, whereas the second snippet makes 1000000 writes to a pipe and sed (largely in parallel, if you have multiple CPUs) makes a considerably smaller number of writes to a disk file due to its output buffering.

You can observe what's going on by running strace.

$ strace -f -e write bash -c 'echo -n a\ {1..2}\ c$'\'\\n\'' >file'
write(1, "a 1 c\n", 6)                  = 6
write(1, " a 2 c\n", 7)                 = 7
$ strace -f -e write bash -c 'echo -n a\ {1..2}\ c$'\'\\n\'' | sed "s/^ //" >file'
Process 28052 attached
Process 28053 attached
Process 28051 suspended
[pid 28052] write(1, "a 1 c\n", 6)      = 6
[pid 28052] write(1, " a 2 c\n", 7)     = 7
Process 28051 resumed
Process 28052 detached
Process 28051 suspended
[pid 28053] write(1, "a 1 c\na 2 c\n", 12) = 12
Process 28051 resumed
Process 28053 detached
--- SIGCHLD (Child exited) @ 0 (0) ---

Other shells such as ksh buffer the output of echo even when it's multiline, so you won't see much of a difference.

$ strace -f -e write ksh -c 'echo -n a\ {1..2}\ c$'\'\\n\'' >file'
write(1, "a 1 c\n a 2 c\n", 13)         = 13
$ strace -f -e write ksh -c 'echo -n a\ {1..2}\ c$'\'\\n\'' | sed "s/^ //" >file'
Process 28058 attached
[pid 28058] write(1, "a 1 c\n a 2 c\n", 13) = 13
Process 28058 detached
--- SIGCHLD (Child exited) @ 0 (0) ---
write(1, "a 1 c\na 2 c\n", 12)          = 12

With bash I get similar timing ratios. With ksh I see the second snippet running slower.

ksh$ time echo -n a\ {1..1000000}\ c$'\n' >file

real    0m1.44s
user    0m1.28s
sys     0m0.06s
ksh$ time echo -n a\ {1..1000000}\ c$'\n' | sed "s/^ //" >file

real    0m2.38s
user    0m1.52s
sys     0m0.14s