ping|awk not responsive

Question

While trying melodyping, I noticed that

ping <host> |awk '{print $1}'

takes about 30 seconds until the first line is actually displayed. Even though w/o piping to awk each ping is returned in about 35 msec.

What causes that delay?

Answer 1

Try this instead ;)

while true; do ping -c 1 <host> | awk '{print $1}'; done

Must be something about how ping terminates lines.