Well, buffered IO does work with sockets, you just have to take into account all of the corners of such use :)

In this particular case one must actually see the code and analyze the data flow, using for example strace. In simple tests, the getline works correctly with pipes. It blocks waiting for EOF or for next "\n". It returns not earlier than obtaining either of those. Completely different story happens when the reading end of pipe is in "non-blocking" mode. Here getline may produce incomplete lines and in general reading would require a lot of care.