Question about terminal input buffering

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <1991Feb9.225929.4447 at jwt.UUCP> john at jwt.UUCP (John Temples) writes:
>Why, when doing something like "cat > file" and typing input from the
>keyboard, are long lines truncated?  On my System V box, it appears
>as though the first 256 characters of a long input line are discarded
>when I look at "file".

The behavior when more than a certain amount of canonical tty input is
buffered up without a new-line is documented in your UNIX Programmer's
Reference Manual or Adminstrator's Reference Manual.  The behavior
varies across different UNIX implementations.  One typical one is to
just beep and discard everything typed to that point.