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I have an xterm window that I would like to continually display the output of a named pipe. However, there seems to be some buffering occurring, and I can't find where it is happening.
I open two terminals. In the first, I make a pipe and watch for anything sent to it.
mkfifo pipe
tail -f pipe
On the second terminal, I send two messages through the pipe, from a single process, separated by some time. I use stdbuf to make sure that the output of the command is unbuffered.
stdbuf -o0 bash -c 'echo hi; sleep 5; echo bye' > pipe
This works as expected, with the first terminal printing hi, then printing bye five seconds later.
However, if I run the tail -f pipe inside an xterm window, then the messages do not appear until the program exits. Clearly, there is some buffering being done, but I cannot find where it is. Is there a way to prevent xterm from buffering the output of programs?
My "normal terminal" uses PuTTY, ssh-ed from Windows 7 to Linux machine. On the Linux machine, uname -a returns Linux hostname 3.2.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.2.65-1+deb7u1 x86_64 GNU/Linux, and xterm -v returns XTerm(278).
Eldritch Cheese
Posted 2015-10-09T15:09:32.157
Reputation: 101
This sounds very odd. Can you give some more details about how you're invoking the xterm? Sounds like it may be running a different shell, or there's something in your .bashrc or .profile which is setting a different environment. (Does the output of the 'env' command differ between the terminal and xterm?) – nickcrabtree – 2015-10-10T21:59:03.727