Paul Eggert wrote: >Pádraig Brady <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > >>Paul Eggert wrote: >> >> >>>If this is merely for debugging, can't you write a wrapper that forces >>>line buffering for a program? The wrapper could substitute your own C >>>library functions via LD_PRELOAD, or could run the program inside a >>>pseudotty a la 'expect'. >>> >>> > > > >>No I was thinking of a more simple general solution, >>rather than a once off complicated hack. >> >> > >But the solution I proposed is general, and would not be a once-off hack. >It could be packaged up into a program like 'nohup' that could invoke >any other program. Such a program (let's call it 'stdiobuf') would be >easy to use. It would not require modifying every other utility. > >It's much better to have a 'nohup' program, than to add a '--nohup' >option to every other standard utility. Similarly, it'd be much >better to have a 'stdiobuf' program, than to add a '--line-buffer' >option to every other standard utility. > > I definitely agree with your sentiment there. However a seperate program would not give as much control. It would only make glibc toggle between line buffering and full buffering on stdout. That however is all the control I have ever needed to be honest, so it may be good enough. So more accurately the program should be called ttyout or something like that.
There is already a script called unbuffer that comes as part of expect, there are caveats mentioned there however: http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man1/unbuffer.1.html Sounds like glibc is the right place for this logic if it needs to be added. > > >>why does grep have the --line-buffered option for example? >> >> > >I don't know; the grep documentation doesn't say much about that >option. But the need for the feature in general cannot be all that >great, if only 'grep' has it now, after all these years of >development. And if we can figure out a better way of doing it than >'grep' does it, we should do it the better way. > > thanks, Pádraig. _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils