A PTY is not like a pipe - there may be delayed between data being written at one end and it being available at the other.
This became particularly apparent after commit f95499c3030f ("n_tty: Don't wait for buffer work in read() loop") in Linux 3.12 Signed-off-by: NeilBrown <ne...@suse.de> --- Peter: does this seem reasonable and accurate to you? MichaelK: Would you prefer the commit ID in the man page. It isn't so much a deliberate change as a code improvement which caused problems for certain use cases which depended on undefined behaviour. Thread at https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/5/1/35 NeilBrown diff --git a/man7/pty.7 b/man7/pty.7 index 1332d11d9ca2..6c9ae182925c 100644 --- a/man7/pty.7 +++ b/man7/pty.7 @@ -56,6 +56,12 @@ terminal emulators, and .BR expect (1). +Data flow between master and slave is handle asynchronously, much like +data flow with a physical TTY. Data written to the slave will be +available at the master promptly, but may not be available +immediately. Similarly there may be a small processing delay between +a write to the master, and the effect being visible at the slave. + Historically, two pseudoterminal APIs have evolved: BSD and System V. SUSv1 standardized a pseudoterminal API based on the System V API, and this API should be employed in all new programs that use
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