Hello all, This afternoon I stumbled upon a weirdness I can't explain. I hope some misc-guru can give a clue.
I was parsing a 45kB html document on my OpenBSD 5.3 with the help of sed to extract a value and it was awfully slow. Quoting the input string gave it a real boost : $ time echo "$webpage" | sed -n -r 's/(.*)\"token\":\"([a-zA-Z0-9]+)\"(.*)/\2/p' 0m0.19s real 0m0.00s user 0m0.00s system $ time echo $webpage | sed -n -r 's/(.*)\"token\":\"([a-zA-Z0-9]+)\"(.*)/\2/p'> 2m14.39s real 2m12.95s user 0m0.00s system What could be the explanation ? Doing the same with GNU sed is instantaneous in both case (quoted/unquoted). Thank you in advance, Denis