Re: possible bug in coreutils?

[Bob Proulx]

Scott Griffith wrote:
> I was just looking at the man page for grep, and wouldn't you know
> it..  --line-buffer is not very well documented.  Infact, all it
> says about that is:
> 
> (excerpt from man page)
> --line-buffering
>               Use line buffering, it can be a performance penality.

And note the documentation bug.  The option is --line-buffer but was
mistakenly documented as --line-buffering.  This is a well known bug
and has already been corrected in the grep project.  I don't recall
the release status of it at the moment though.

>      Your solution seems to be the missing piece.  When I piped in 350
> lines of tail, your's worked where as mine still seems to hang there. 
> I even tried to send my output to a file, and still nothing.  Maybe the
> man page could get an update describing what --line-buffer actually
> does?  Just a thought.

Because of the documentation bug there has been a lot of discussion
about it on the bug-grep list.  But as I said, I don't recall the
result off of the top of my head.

>      Once again, Thank you very much for your assistance.  My work
> around did the job, but I would much rather have it done in real time.
> (or as close as possible without actually writing a C/C++ program)

You might find this discussion interesting.  By a coincidence the same
issue was brought up in a different thread.

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2006-03/msg00071.html

Bob