"cut -f" has an apparently long-standing behavior that I'd consider a
bug: it does not fully send line N to stdout until the first character
of line N+1 has been read on stdin. This is confusing when stdin comes
from "tail -f" or the like. The exact behavior varies slightly. If
stdin is a tty, all but the trailing newline will be flushed
immediately and then the trailing newline will be flushed when the
next character shows up. If stdin is not a tty, there's no flush at
all until the next character shows up.
For example, if I type the following into a shell on Ubuntu 12.04.1,
meaning cut from coreutils 8.13 and glibc package version
2.15-0ubuntu10.3:
cut -f1-
foo
bar
baz
^D
I will see the following:
$ cut -f1-
foo
foobar
barbaz
baz
$
and if I instead use "cat | cut -f1-" in the first line, I will see
the following:
$ cat | cut -f1-
foo
bar
foo
baz
bar
baz
$
(coreutils's cut -c does not have the same laggy behavior. Neither
does BSD cut on my OS X machine in either -c or -f mode.)
This code in cut_fields (still found in trunk tip) is responsible for
delaying the newline; it runs between the newline being read and being
written:
if (c == '\n')
{
c = getc (stream);
if (c != EOF)
{
ungetc (c, stream);
c = '\n';
}
}
I believe that code is there to avoid turning one newline at EOF into
two, but that goal could be accomplished in another way.
I don't know exactly why the behavior differs based on stdin being a
tty or not. My best guess is that glibc might have some logic that, if
stdin is a tty, automatically flushes stdout any time the program
blocks on stdin. glibc's stdio internals are a bit hard for me to
follow, so I haven't found the code in question. Apparently this is a
vaguely standardized behavior; I see a stackoverflow post mentioning
the following:
"""
The input and output dynamics of interactive devices shall take place
as specified in 7.19.3. The intent of these requirements is that
unbuffered or line-buffered output appear as soon as possible, to
ensure that prompting messages actually appear prior to a program
waiting for input.
(ISO/IEC 9899:TC2 Committee Draft -- May 6, 2005, page 14).
"""