A surprisingly arcane little Unix shell pipeline example

Because the left side of the pipeline has two things to do instead of one, often it will be the ‘ ‘ process that wins the race. The second is that ‘ ‘ is a builtin command in shells today, and so the left side’s ‘ ‘ is actually all being handled by one process instead of the ‘ ‘ being its own separate process. This wouldn’t happen if wasn’t a specially handled builtin; if it was a separate command (or even if the shell forked to execute it internally), only the ‘ ‘ process would die from the instead of the entire left side of the pipeline.

Source: utcc.utoronto.ca