Stdio buffering question

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <16176 at brl-adm.ARPA> rbj at ICST-CMR.ARPA (Root Boy Jim) writes:
>Gee, Doug, RTFM! ... for some reason it was dropped in the 4.3 manual.

Which is what I have.  R'ing TFM doesn't do much good in such cases.

>Maybe you should *use* something before you put it down.

>? > I won't accuse [csh] of directing standard error output into pipes.

Far from "putting it down", here I was defending csh against what
appeared (and still appears) to be an erroneous claim about it.

>? > Indeed I think you'd have to work fairly hard to get it to do so.

Several people pointed out that |& provides a convenient way to do this,
so I was mistaken about how hard it was.  It's nice, but not as useful
as one might think, since the standard output and standard error output
are in general unsynchronized.  The data flowing down the pipeline can
consequently look pretty messy.