Personally I find silversearcher (ag) faster, and reinventing standard commandline tools with a collection of other tools is often slower.
One liner shell commands often turn complicated quickly.
One liner shell commands often turn complicated quickly.
But has too many weird quirks that it can replace grep for data munging. E.g.
$ ag verb fullform_nn.txt >/tmp/verbs
ERR: Too many matches in fullform_nn.txt. Skipping the rest of this file.
$ grep -c verb fullform_nn.txt
206077
$ ag --max-count 206077 verb fullform_nn.txt >/tmp/verbs
ERR: Too many matches in fullform_nn.txt. Skipping the rest of this file.
Have you rerun your tests in the "C" locale?