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From: Stephane Chazelas <stephane.chazelas@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: gnu.bash.bug
Subject: Re: Unexpected delay in using arguments.
Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2018 23:21:58 +0100
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Cc: Bize Ma <binaryzebra@gmail.com>, bug-bash <bug-bash@gnu.org>
To: Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu>
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2018-08-14 11:25:04 -0400, Chet Ramey:
[...]
> If you build a profiling version of bash, you'll find that about 75% of
> that time is spent copying the list of arguments around, since you have
> to save and restore it each time you call f1. Looking at making that more
> efficient has been a low-level task for a while now.
[...]

To save and restore that list of arguments, you only need to
save and restore one pointer. I don't see why you'd need to copy
the full list of pointers let alone the text of the arguments.

Note that it makes scripts using functions and that receive a
large number of arguments (think of scripts called as find .
-exec myscript {} + for instance) terribly inefficient.

find / -xdev -exec bash -c 'f(){ :;}; for i do f; done' bash {} +

(do nothing in a function for all the files in my root file
system) takes 4 seconds in dash and 9 minutes (135 times as
much) in bash.

-- 
Stephane