Re: Cat and -u, unbuffered output support

[Bob Proulx]

Scott Bronson wrote:
> Hello.  It is driving me nuts that GNU cat doesn't support the -u
> option.  It it makes it difficult to port software from other Unix
> systems to GNU.

But '-u' *is* accepted as a valid option to cat.  It is ignored since
"Write bytes from the input file to the standard output without delay
as each is read." as required by the standards is always the default
with GNU cat.  I don't see how this could be causing a portability
problem for you.  Scripts calling for 'cat -u' should work fine.

> Is there any reason that you chose to remove the -u feature?
> Would you accept a patch to add it back?

Would you be so kind as to double check the version of 'cat' that you
are using?  And also perhaps what OS you are running on if that is
important?  This feature of 'cat' does not appear to have changed for
a very long time.  I suspect that you are not actually using GNU cat
at all!

  cat --version

  uname -a

Bob

P.S. Note that the latest version is available here:

  http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/coreutils/