Re: suggested addition to 'date'

On 2006-08-11 21:31, Julian Elischer <julian_at_elischer.org> wrote:
>Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
>>On 2006-08-11 20:54, Julian Elischer <julian_at_elischer.org> wrote:
>>> Yes I said I hacked it in :-)
>>> In my app you will never have such long lines..
>>> basically you need something that reads lines and tells you how much it 
>>> read..
>>> (I have no idea WHY fgets need sto return the START.. you already KNOW 
>>> that!)
>>> it'd be nice if you didn't have to to a strlen() on each line.
>>
>> Perhaps the solution Sam proposed is much better then? 
>>
>>To read one
>>character at-a-time and only special-case the '\n' characters?
>
> I didn't see that being mentionned anywhere, but I guess compared to 
> running date once for every line
> I could live with a strlen().  :-)
> it'd probably be more efficient than doing it one char at a time.
>
> >Maybe something like this?
> >
> >	if (sflag) {
> >
> > 
> >
> [...]
> 
> >				otval = tval;
> >			}
> >			(void)printf("%s", buf);
> >			if (fflush(stdout))
> > 
> >
> 
> wonder if it would want to be flushed less often if stdout was a file..
> I think stdio would do the right thing in most cases so I guess teh 
> fflush woudl only be needed at the end, after the last file,
> or maybe just on a signal handler so it flushes out the last buffer on ^C

IIRC, stdio can buffer more than one line, so now that you mention it,
maybe it is a good idea to flush at every '\n' character to make output
appear every time there's a complete line ready.

I'm too sleepy to run tests now, but if you still want something inside
date(1) -- which is probably the only logical place to put it (to let us
leverage the date/time formatting code date(1) already has) -- then I
can run a few tests during the weekend and see which approach works
better, for some definition of `better' :-)