Make stdout and stderr be buffered by the same buffer

Question

Is it possible to force glibc to use the same buffer for stdout and stderr?

If I tee the both outputs:

./tests/tests 2>&1 | tee log

I get mixed messages (i.e. messages are ordered inside stdout and stderr but not with respect to each other). I can turn off the buffering:

stdbuf -i0 -o0 -e0 ./tests/tests 2>&1 | tee log

But it cause large slowdown (I'm pushing hundreds of MB of log). Is it possible to do have buffering but have it shared between stdout and stderr? FD 1 and 2 points to the same output (as in example).

Answer 1

I'm not entirely certain in what context you want to make the buffer the same, but in a C program, the author can use the setbuf() family of library functions to give stderr and stdout the same buffer.

Just usig the shell to invoke other programs, I don't think you can do this, for the reasons implied by the setbuf family of functions: the implementations of FILE *stderr and FILE *stdout have a per instance piece of memory (the buffer). If a program doesn't get written in a specific way, a way that sets the buffer to be the same piece of memory for stdout and stderr, then the shell can't make a program do that common buffering.