The stated use case for the perf improvement was "yes(1) may be used to generate repeating patterns of text for test inputs etc., so adjust to be more efficient

The stated use case for the perf improvement was "yes(1) may be used to generate repeating patterns of text for test inputs etc., so adjust to be more efficient." Source: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/35217221c211f3116f374f305654462195aa634a https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/35217221c211f3... I've personally used it for generating repeating text and filling disks in system testing, so I appreciate it being faster at those tasks. I also sometimes use it as a signal generator for a hacky load generator, like so: yes | xargs -L 1 -P NUM_PROCESSES -I {} curl SOME_TARGET_URL > /dev/null This doesn't benefit from being faster per se, but I appreciate it using less CPU since I want to give curl as much system resources as possible.