however, the loading time for the 70k grep is going to be 1/10 the loading time for the perl'd grep (perl'd grep requiring the loading of a 700k interpreter as well as the compilation and execution). As powerful as perl is, and even if the script is only 820 bytes, it still has to load the 700k interpreter before it even gets to the grep, by that time, we've loaded the grep and are chugging through the file with the native binary.