[dan_mctree]

>Yes, you could write some hand made program. And piping software together IS a kind of hand made program. It's just going to be far faster to write that pipeline, than to write a custom program, deploy, and run it.

I suppose the speed of implementation depends entirely on your available experience. If I were to try to reproduce the data processing pipeline in your link, it would take me hours to get to this line "cat *.pgn | grep "Result" | sort | uniq -c", and would probably never be able to get to any of the further steps.

Meanwhile, with my experience, I would've been able to write a 5 minute C# program that does exactly the same data processing. I don't know if it'd go down all the way to 12 seconds of execution time without serious effort, but I'm pretty sure it would handily beat the version I could write using the commandline.

If this task is a single time kind of thing, the C# program more than suffices. If it's a many times kind of thing, I'd strongly prefer having it in C# code, so I can more easily adjust it and make it part of a larger automated workflow which will mostly consist of other C# code.

[jimbokun]

Well sure. If you only know one tool and don’t invest in learning anything else, of course you’ll be faster implementing solutions in it than anything else.