Cost of file Operation in Shell Script

Question

I just want to know, the file operation in shell script is expensive operation?. We can say, it is expensive in Java or other OOP languages(Need to call open() with read or write option and then we can read or write). But in shell script, we can redirect the output like echo $line > /root/test.txt I cant see any overhead or expensive operation. Read is expensive or write?

Answer 1

You probably wouldn't notice much of a problem processing small files, out of interest you might like to read the answers to this question.