Reduce writes from a specific application?

Question

I'm logging the output of a command with

command | tee file

This causes tee to actually write to the disk every second or so. I'd like to reduce the frequency of the writes, by caching the output more.

I know this can be done at the system level, for all processes, but is there a simple way to do this at the user level, just for this process?

(Having tee write to ramdisk and then having another process periodically copy the output; or modifying tee itself seem overly complicated)

I don't understand why you accepted an answer that you said did not help you. — Lightness Races in Orbit, Jan 26 '16 at 00:31
@LightnessRacesinOrbit it answered it in general, and if my particular case cannot be addressed (easily), that's useful to know. If there are better answers that prove this wrong, I'll change the "accept" vote. — MWB, Jan 26 '16 at 00:41
You could leave the question without an unaccepted answer to encourage more people to come along and post competing answers. You don't need to accept an answer right away. — Lightness Races in Orbit, Jan 26 '16 at 00:48

Matthew Ife · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-25T20:52:59.863

4

Try

command | stdbuf -o5M cut -b-

For 5MiB output buffering. See man stdbuf for a list of options. Note this doesn't work with tee which overrides the the buffer modes.

edited Jan 25 '16 at 20:52

answered Jan 25 '16 at 19:21

Matthew Ife

1

Thanks, but if this doesn't work with tee, how does this help me? – MWB Jan 25 '16 at 20:45
If you want to log the output of a command, redirect stdout to a file you want to log it to. – Matthew Ife Jan 25 '16 at 20:47
1

I want to get both stdout and the log file (hence `tee`) – MWB Jan 25 '16 at 20:48
Well, I checked and `cat` also doesnt work. I suppose `cut` will. I edited the command. `tee` is not designed to work this way, so pick your poison. – Matthew Ife Jan 25 '16 at 20:52

1 Answers1