How to make output of any shell command unbuffered?

stdout buffering
bodacydo picture bodacydo · Aug 12, 2010 · Viewed 61.6k times · Source

Is there a way to run shell commands without output buffering?

For example, hexdump file | ./my_script will only pass input from hexdump to my_script in buffered chunks, not line by line.

Actually I want to know a general solution how to make any command unbuffered?

Answer

lambshaanxy picture lambshaanxy · Aug 28, 2014

Try stdbuf, included in GNU coreutils and thus virtually any Linux distro. This sets the buffer length for input, output and error to zero:

stdbuf -i0 -o0 -e0 command

Related questions

How to buffer stdout in memory and write it from a dedicated thread

I have a C application with many worker threads. It is essential that these do not block so where the worker threads need to write to a file on disk, I have them write to a circular buffer in memory, …

Read More
Why does printf() not print anything before sleep()?

I'm just learning C with Kernighan and Ritchie's book; I'm in the basics of the fourth chapter (functions stuff). The other day I became curious about the sleep() function, so tried to use it like this: #include <stdio.h&…

Read More
Is it safe to disable buffering with stdout and stderr?

Sometimes we put some debug prints in our code this way printf("successfully reached at debug-point 1\n"); some code is here printf("successfully reached at debug-point 2"); After the last printf a segmentation fault occurs. Now in this condition only debug-point1 …

Read More