Holy Moly Perl-man... point well made, and taken. 8-)

How is it that Perl manages to get the current timestamp
for each iteration so much _more_ quickly? Doesn't it need
to request that info (in real time) from the OS as well?
[it also seems to parse the data strings faster too]

Anyway, thanks for that impressive proof.

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In the end, both perl and the `date` command are making the same system library call, time.
See `man -s 3 time`

The difference is all in the overhead in setting up the execution environment.
In the perl, this is done once and the interpreter can then make rapid-fire system calls.
In the bash (and awk) examples, every invocation of `date` has to exec a full new command / execution environment, which is comparatively extremely resource intensive.

bash is a fantastic and very capable shell, but unless your script is written entirely with built-ins, you are going to pay a performance penalty for every external command invoked. This isn't something exclusive to bash, of course. You have the same issues in Perl, in fact, if your script relies heavily on using the system, exec, or backtick commands.

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