Re: running parallel make jobs and avoiding jumbled/garbled output?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Per Jessen <address@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2008 11:55:50 +0100
> Y-Perjessen: Thu Feb 21 11:55:50 CET 2008
> 
> I use "make -jN" quite a lot for parallelizing many jobs (all kinds, not
> just compile jobs).  The output is obviously jumbled, and it's not
> really very useful as such.  I don't mind that - I usually finish off
> such a parallel run with a single job that logs the status of the rest. 
> However, when I run such a parallel make via cron, the output is not
> just jumbled, it's garbled.  Lines are overwritten, lines are mixed,
> lines are missing, in particular my final status output.  Has anyone
> else experienced this and what have you done about it (if anything) ?

I suspect that the output is garbled because, in a cron job, the
standard streams are fully buffered, not line buffered as they are in
an interactive run.  Therefore, buffers are flushed in a random place,
not on line boundaries.

Maybe adding an option to make that explicitly sets line buffering for
stdout and stderr, and using that option in a cron job, would solve
your problem (assuming I'm guessing right).