Question of the Week  QotW: Does running Commands in Verbose
Mode slow them down?  August 1, 2011 by nhinkle. 3 comments
This week’s Question of the Week comes from MaxMaxie, and is
about command line usage in Linux:  Does running commands
verbosely make them slower?  I’ve found myself using the -v flag
for lots of applications less and less (especially for trivial
stuff liketar and cp). However, when I did and I was, say,
unzipping a large file, it would take longer than when I didn’t
use the -v flag. I assume this is because the terminal has to
process the text and I’m filling up whatever buffer it might
have. But my question is, does this make the application
actually run slower or does it complete in the same amount of
time and what I’m seeing is the terminal trying to catch up?
According to Matt Jenkins, it does indeed. His explanation of
why is an interesting read, but the question remains: exactly
how much does it slow things down? I decided to find out – read
on to see just how much of a difference