[justinsaccount]

Here's a good example. Came up just the other day.

    $ du -hs big.log;time cat big.log  > /dev/null
    199M	big.log

    real	0m0.045s
    user	0m0.002s
    sys	0m0.043s
    $ time gtr a b < big.log > /dev/null

    real	0m0.334s
    user	0m0.182s
    sys	0m0.142s
    $ time tr a b < big.log > /dev/null

    real	0m33.105s
    user	0m31.757s
    sys	0m0.488s
    $

I don't have a freebsd machine around to see if it's just apples tr that is broken.

I'm sure it's related to unicode bullshit, but the usual env var tricks don't seem to help.