Re: piping tail -f through cut

[James Youngman]

On Feb 8, 2008 5:26 PM, Micah Cowan <address@hidden> wrote:
> It is a very silly idea, considering it would violate the C standard
> (§7.19.3#7):
>
> As initially opened, the standard error stream is not fully buffered;
> the standard input and standard output streams are fully buffered if and
> only if the stream can be determined not to refer to an interactive device.

That doesn't by itself make it a silly idea.  It just means that
glibc-based systems where the user has set (e.g.)
_FORCE_GLIBC_STDIO_BUFFERING to the value "line" would not be
conforming. Since such an option would not be mandatory (or the
default) this is not in itself a reason not to support this.    But of
course it would make all scripts which rely on this behaviour
non-portable.

James.