[Courses] Re: [C] A clarification on fflush(stderr)

[Akkana]

Laura Bowser writes:
> stderr is *supposed* to be unbuffered according to the ANSI C standard - this
> doesn't mean that it is..  In *most* systems, stderr can be flushed by
> putting a newline at the end of a printf format string, but if you want to
> *guarantee* that you get your output at that time, use fflush.

The reason a newline flushes the output buffer on stdout and stderr
(at least on most systems) is that those those streams are line
buffered.  Stdio (standard I/O) treams can be fully buffered (many
characters are saved up and written as a block), line buffered (written
as soon as a newline is seen), or unbuffered (each character will be
written immediately).  By default, a stream that goes to a terminal
(such as stdout and stderr if you don't redirect them) is line buffered,
any other stream is fully buffered; but you can change the buffering for
any stream using the setbuf command, or you can use fflush to flush a
stream.

This is documented in man setbuf (but it took some digging around in
stdio.h to remind myself which man page to look in).

	...Akkana