Is there a cat alternative that supports unbuffered output?

Question

I'm looking for a program to copy stdin to stdout while showing control characters (like cat -v) and without waiting for an EOF (the input is from a tail -f). I have GNU|Linux; the cat that's installed ignores the -u flag.

Answer 1

GNU cat ignores -u because its output is always unbuffered. So, when you ask for unbuffered output with -u, you get it (but you also get it even when you don't ask for it).

GNU tail has the same, always-unbuffered behaviour.

To prove this, in one shell I did:

while :; do echo -ne "hello\t"; sleep 1;done > testtail

which appends the word 'hello' followed by a tab, every second (with no newlines)

In another shell I did (cat -T is similar to cat -v -- it shows tabs as ^I):

tail -f testtail | cat -T

which gives me:

hello^Ihello^Ihello^Ihello^I ...

updated every second.

Answer 2

BSD cat's -u option disabled output buffering. From man cat:

-u      Disable output buffering.