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cat and grep generally aren't builtins, so shells can't rely on them to have any particular behavior.

Cat could use splice and basically reduce the overhead to nothing. It possibly already does.

> Could a shell detect cat abuse and replace it with the right grep incantation?

That sounds like shell abuse via bloat.

Not saying it is necessarily a good idea, just curious if any such optimization is possible. It seems (from thewakalix comment above) not being a built in it would not be possible.

Now we only need to remove the other 100% of the bloat in the shell ;)