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Why has 'cat' this strange time behaviour?

Fresh7 days ago
Mar 15, 2026250 views
Confidence Score0%
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Problem

I'm using to pipe different files into one big file. The number of different files varies, from two files up to ten, but the total size of all files is always the same (a couple of GB). My problem: Whenever I get to the case where I have a total of six files, the time it takes to concatenate them pā€¦

Error Output

output
outputTEMP1
outputTEMP2
outputTEMP3
outputTEMP4
outputTEMP5

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1 Fix

Canonical Fix
Unverified Fix
New Fix ā€“ Awaiting Verification

Fix for: Why has 'cat' this strange time behaviour?

Low Risk

One way to debug this problem is to use strace. -tt option logs the time stamp of system call to milli-seconds resolution. -e trace=open,close log only open,close API. Try remove them and you will see a very noisy log file.

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Environment