Benchmark: MacOS tr vs GNU gtr

Post #6 in this bash benchmark series, measuring the speed of common bash text manipulations.

This one is a bit different. I will specifically be looking at the difference in performance and behaviour between the factory installed tr (/usr/bin/tr) and the optionally installable GNU version of the same tool, gtr.

If you want to try this on your Mac, install with brew install coreutils (and maybe also gnu-sed, gawk … )

I installed the GNU coreutils on my Mac because I noticed that there were some –flags I couldn’t use with the native version. The first comparison I did between tr and gtr was very promising.

using tr

Command: 'tr [:upper:] [:lower:]'
Before: 'LOREM IPSUM DOLOR SIT AMET, CONSECTETUR ADIPISCING ELIT'
After : 'lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit'  (LANG = en_US.UTF-8)

• Binary: /usr/bin/tr
• Throughput speed: 25 MB/sec
• Invocation speed: 838 ops/sec

using gtr

Command: 'gtr [:upper:] [:lower:]'
Before: 'LOREM IPSUM DOLOR SIT AMET, CONSECTETUR ADIPISCING ELIT'
After : 'lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit'  (LANG = en_US.UTF-8)

• Binary: /opt/homebrew/Cellar/coreutils/9.1/bin/gtr
• Version: tr (GNU coreutils) 9.1
• Throughput speed: 1020 MB/sec ««
• Invocation speed: 805 ops/sec

This means gtr is 40x faster in throughput than the standard tr!

However, my enthusiasm quickly subsided when I did the following test.

Command: 'gtr [:upper:] [:lower:]'
Before: 'ŁORÈM ÎPSÙM DÔLÕR SIT AMÉT ŒßÞ'
After : '�or�m �ps�m d�l�r sit am�t ���'  (LANG = en_US.UTF-8)

• Binary: /opt/homebrew/Cellar/coreutils/9.1/bin/gtr
• Version: tr (GNU coreutils) 9.1
• Throughput speed: 1031 MB/sec
• Invocation speed: 750 ops/sec

It seems the GNU version of tr does not support accented characters and diacritics. In fact, the GNU tr page explicitly says that “GNU tr fully supports only safe single-byte locales, where each possible input byte represents a single character”. No Multi-byte, so no UTF-8. This makes it unusable for most of my bash benchmarks.

Benchmark via pforret/bash_benchmarks

So what is my recommendation for tr or gtr?

• if you know you won’t have accents/diacritics/foreign alphabets in your input, use gtr.
• otherwise, use tr. It’s not fast, but it supports more ‘weird’ characters.