shell compiler?

[Scott Larnach]

Have any of you wizards out there any idea of how much of the time a
shell script spends being interpreted by the shell and how much it
spends actually doing the work?  Would a program which turned a shell
script into an equivalent C program (which would handle i/o
redirections, fork/exec the appropriate commands, etc.) usefully
improve the speed of my scripts?  Has anybody ever used such a beast?
Is there one in the public domain?

Many Thanks 

- Scott
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Scott Larnach			Janet: scott at uk.ac.ed.itspna
Edinburgh Unix Support		Arpa:  scott at itspna.ed.ac.uk
Tel:	+44 31 667 1081 x2629	Uucp:  scott at cstvax.uucp