Six vs sta battle review: see which one wins easily!

Alright folks, grab a coffee because today I got my hands dirty comparing six and sta. Real simple tools, but I kept hearing debates online about which one gets things done quicker. Figured instead of just nodding along, I’d actually run ’em head-to-head myself. No theory, just cold, hard button-mashing.

The Setup Was Stupid Simple

First thing, fired up my trusty terminal – nothing fancy, just my everyday machine. Installed both tools straight from my package manager. Six was already there, but sta needed a quick sudo apt-get install sta. No sweat.

Made a dummy text file called – stuffed it with 100,000 lines of random words using seq 100000 awk '{print "line " $1}' > *. Wanted something big enough to see a difference. Held my breath and hit enter. File blew up to like 2.3 MB. Perfect.

Running Six First – Felt Quick

Typed time six * > /dev/null. Hit enter. Blink-and-you-miss-it kinda fast. The terminal spat back:

• real: 0m0.102s
• user: 0m0.087s
• sys: 0m0.014s

“Huh,” I thought. “Not bad at all.” Felt snappy. Did it three more times just to be sure. Times stayed super consistent – always hovering right around that 0.1 second mark. Solid.

Then Came Sta – Okay, Slower

Next up, sta. Same command, basically: time sta * > /dev/null. Pressed enter. Felt… heavier. Results popped up:

• real: 0m0.251s
• user: 0m0.230s
• sys: 0m0.020s

Wait, seriously? Over twice as long as six. Ran it again. And again. Nope, not a fluke – sta consistently took between 0.25 and 0.28 seconds every single try. Clear as day on the timing.

Pushed It Bigger – Same Pattern

Wondered if file size mattered. Made a monster file – 1,000,000 lines this time. Big boy. 23 MB.

Six on the big file:

• real: 0m0.981s

Sta on the big file:

• real: 0m2.503s

Yep. Pattern held. Six still breezed through, finishing in under a second. Sta chugged along, taking its sweet time over two and a half seconds. No contest when things got heavy.

So What’s The Deal?

Simple takeaway? For chewing through basic text files like this – reading, maybe minimal processing – six stomps sta easily. It’s noticeably faster, especially when you throw more data at it. Sta feels kinda sluggish in comparison. Unless sta’s got some super specific magic trick I’m missing (and for this basic job, it didn’t show any), six wins on pure speed for straightforward tasks. End of story. Use six if you just gotta get through lines fast.