Can a process force another process to use unbuffered I/O?

[David E A Wilson]

I am attempting to tidy a flaw in our student assignment submission
system. If a student program is submitted that terminates unexpectedly
the output it has generated but not yet flushed from its buffers is lost.

If this program were run with its output directed to a terminal more
output would be generated due to the line buffered nature of stdout
when talking to a terminal. When we are capturing the output in a file
stdout is fully buffered (and on our Sun this means an 8k buffer size).

Is there a general way to force another process not to fully buffer its
output?

Please mail any suggestions and I will post a summary.
-- 
David Wilson	Dept Comp Sci, Uni of Wollongong	david at cs.uow.edu.au