Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's pretty unscientific :-) To measure anything that fast reliably you have to do it more than once: [ron@mickey:~/foo]$ cat foo foo [ron@mickey:~/foo]$ time for i in {1..1000}; do cp foo foo.c.$i; done real 0m2.705s user 0m0.524s sys 0m2.190s [ron@mickey:~/foo]$ time for i in {1..1000}; do ln foo foo.l.$i; done real 0m2.618s user 0m0.486s sys 0m2.008s
Now you are measuring the speed of the fork/exec call. To really do this right you need to write a small script that copies the file 1000 times or creates a hard link 1000 times.
No, fork is a lot faster than disk I/O:
[ron@mickey:~]$ time for i in {1..1000}; do echo foo>/dev/null; done
real 0m0.064s
user 0m0.039s
sys 0m0.025s