Re: tee wishlist: --immediate option?

[Jim Meyering]

"Steven G. Johnson" <address@hidden> wrote:
> This is just a wishlist item of mine that I thought I would pass on for
> your consideration.  It would be nice if tee had an option like
> --immediate that would flush its output immediately instead of writing it
> in large chunks (8k, I think).
>
> The reason is that I sometimes like to use tee to save the output of slow
> numerical computations, while still viewing the output in the terminal to
> monitor the progress.  This doesn't work very well, though, because the
> of tee's buffering--I may not get any output at all until the program
> finishes.
>
> In other words, it would be nice if tee's output could come at (at least)
> the same rate as the output of the program without tee.

Thanks for the report.

tee (at least in coreutils) already arranges not to do buffering
on standard output, as POSIX requires.  Since you're writing to the
semi-obsolete bug-sh-utils address, I suspect you're using an older
version of tee.  address@hidden is the preferred bug-reporting
address.

Can you reproduce your problem with the tee from one of these
newer packages?

  STABLE
    ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.0.tar.gz
    ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.0.tar.bz2
    (coreutils is the union of fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils)

  BETA
    ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.0.91.tar.gz
    ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.0.91.tar.bz2

If so, and if you can describe your system and how to reproduce
the problem well enough that I can duplicate the failure, then
we should be able to fix it.