Re: Built-in printf Sits Awkwardly with UDP.

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Chet,

> > I see why it's line-buffered when writing to a terminal, but when
> > bash changes where stdout points it has the option to setvbuf(3) or
> > similar too based on what it knows about the destination, e.g.
> > /dev/pts/3 versus /tmp/foo versus /dev/udp/0x7f000001/4242.  Does it
> > never do this then, and just leave things as line-buffered all the
> > time?
> 
> Bash ensures that stdout and stderr are line-buffered, and leaves them
> that way.  It's a guessing game otherwise.  Say sockets and pipes both
> present themselves the same way.  Do you fully buffer, which reduces
> pipe throughput and concurrency, unbuffer, which cuts performance
> dramatically, or assume that line buffering is the right choice the
> majority of the time? 

Thanks for the reply.  I understand it's behaviour now and agree sockets
and pipes could look the same.  But a regular file ./foo on disk does
look different and it still seems odd that

    printf '\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n' >foo

does a dozen one-byte write(2)s.  Still, at least it explains the UDP
behaviour.

Thanks again, Ralph.