How is GNU's yes so fast? $ yes | pv > /dev/null ... [10.2GiB/s] ... Compared to other Unices, GNU is outrageously fast. NetBSD's is 139MiB/s, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD have very similar code as NetBSD and are probably identical, illumos's is 141MiB/s without an argument, 100MiB/s with. OS X just uses an old NetBSD version similar to OpenBSD's, MINIX uses NetBSD's, BusyBox's is 107MiB/s, Ultr