The three types of buffering available are unbuffered, block buffered, and
line buffered.
When an output stream is unbuffered, information appears on
the destination file or terminal as soon as written; when it is block
buffered many characters are saved up and written as a block; when it is
line buffered characters are saved up until a newline is output or input is
read from any stream attached to a terminal device (typically stdin).
The function
fflush(3)
may be used to force the block out early.
(See
fclose(3).)
Normally all files are block buffered.
When the first I/O operation occurs on a file,
malloc(3)
is called, and a buffer is obtained.
If a stream refers to a terminal (as
stdout
normally does) it is line buffered.
The standard error stream
stderr
is always unbuffered by default.
The
setvbuf()
function may be used on any open stream to change its buffer.
The
mode
argument must be one of the following three macros:
_IONBF
unbuffered
_IOLBF
line buffered
_IOFBF
fully buffered
Except for unbuffered files, the
buf
argument should point to a buffer at least
size
bytes long; this buffer will be used instead of the current buffer.
If the argument
buf
is NULL,
only the mode is affected; a new buffer will be allocated on the next read
or write operation.
The
setvbuf()
function may only be used after opening a stream and before any other
operations have been performed on it.
The other three calls are, in effect, simply aliases for calls to
setvbuf().
The
setbuf()
function is exactly equivalent to the call
The
setbuffer()
function is the same, except that the size of the buffer is up to the
caller, rather than being determined by the default
BUFSIZ.
The
setlinebuf()
function is exactly equivalent to the call:
setvbuf(stream, (char *) NULL, _IOLBF, 0);
RETURN VALUE
The function
setvbuf()
returns 0 on success.
It returns non-zero on failure
(mode
is invalid or the request cannot be honored).
It may set
errno
on failure.
The other functions do not return a value.
CONFORMING TO
The
setbuf()
and
setvbuf()
functions conform to C89 and C99.
BUGS
The
setbuffer()
and
setlinebuf()
functions are not portable to versions of BSD before 4.2BSD, and
are available under Linux since libc 4.5.21.
On 4.2BSD and 4.3BSD systems,
setbuf()
always uses a suboptimal buffer size and should be avoided.
You must make sure that the space that
buf
points to still exists by the time
stream
is closed, which also happens at program termination.
For example, the following is invalid:
This page is part of release 3.14 of the Linux
man-pages
project.
A description of the project,
and information about reporting bugs,
can be found at
http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.