Why does awk do full buffering when reading from a pipe

Question

I'm reading from a serial port connected to a gps device sending nmea strings.

A simplified invocation to illustrate my point:

  $ awk '{ print $0 }' /dev/ttyPSC9 
  GPGGA,073651.000,6310.1043,N,01436.1539,E,1,07,1.0,340.2,M,33.3,M,,0000*56
  $GPGSA,A,3,28,22,09,27,01,19,17,,,,,,2.3,1.0,2.0*39
  $GPRMC,073651.000,A,6310.1043,N,01436.1539,E,0.42,163.42,070312,,,A*67
  GPGGA,073652.000,6310.1043,N,01436.1540,E,1,07,1.0,339.2,M,33.3,M,,0000*55
  $GPGSA,A,3,28,22,09,27,01,19,17,,,,,,2.3,1.0,2.0*39

If I instead try to read from a pipe, awk buffers the input before sending it to stdout.

$ cat /dev/ttyPSC9 | awk '{ print $0 }'
<long pause>
GPGGA,073651.000,6310.1043,N,01436.1539,E,1,07,1.0,340.2,M,33.3,M,,0000*56
$GPGSA,A,3,28,22,09,27,01,19,17,,,,,,2.3,1.0,2.0*39
$GPRMC,073651.000,A,6310.1043,N,01436.1539,E,0.42,163.42,070312,,,A*67
GPGGA,073652.000,6310.1043,N,01436.1540,E,1,07,1.0,339.2,M,33.3,M,,0000*55
$GPGSA,A,3,28,22,09,27,01,19,17,,,,,,2.3,1.0,2.0*39

How can I avoid the buffering?

Edit: Kyle Jones suggested that cat is buffering it's output but that doesn't appear to be happening:

$ strace cat /dev/ttyPSC9 | awk '{ print $0 }'
write(1, "2,"..., 2)                    = 2
read(3, "E"..., 4096)                   = 1
write(1, "E"..., 1)                     = 1
read(3, ",0"..., 4096)                  = 2

When I think about it: I thought that a program used line buffering when writing to a terminal and "regular buffering" for all other cases. Then, why is cat not buffering more? Is the serial port signaling EOF? Then why is cat not terminated?

Answer 1

It is likely to be buffering in awk, not cat. In the first case, awk believes it is interactive because its input and output are TTYs (even though they're different TTYs - I'm guessing that awk is not checking that). In the second, the input is a pipe so it runs non-interactively.

You will need to explicitly flush in your awk program. This is not portable, though.

For more background and details on how to flush output, read: http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/I_002fO-Functions.html

Answer 2

I know it is an old question, but a one-liner may help those who come here searching:

cat /dev/ttyPSC9 | awk '{ print $0; system("")}'

system("") does the trick, and is POSIX compliant. Non-posix systems: beware.

There exists a more specific function fflush() that does the same, but is not available in older versions of awk.

An important piece of information from the docs regarding the use of system(""):

gawk treats this use of the system() function as a special case and is smart enough not to run a shell (or other command interpreter) with the empty command. Therefore, with gawk, this idiom is not only useful, it is also efficient.