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Rafe Colburn from Etsy wrote about this performance oddity: http://rc3.org/2014/08/28/surprisingly-perl-outperforms-sed-...

EDIT to manage expectations: the article doesn't explain why, it just provides benchmarks and one commenter made a suggestion about character handling. More insight still welcome :)

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There are many different versions of awk: gawk, (BSD) nawk, mawk, etc. I think OS X uses nawk, but mawk is reputedly faster. Gawk is definitely slower than both mawk. I'm not surprised that Perl is faster though.

> I used the default OS X versions of these tools. The versions were Perl 5.16.2, Awk 20070501, and some version of BSD sed from 2005

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