"Tim Watts" wrote in message
...

But I don't see why that non embedded systems don't switch to using perl -
it would probably be more efficient as you wouldn't be spawning hundreds
of
processes running cut and grep and so on during system startup.

We saved 50% of the boot time for unix by taking the bits of source from
the various startup programs that were run and compiling it into one
process. Not bad for a couple of hours work.