Sleep behavior across platforms

boltman has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hola-
Last night I was trying to run a perl script that I had been running on a W2k machine with ActivePerl (5.6.1) on my Linux box. I ran into a problem which I have distilled into the following example.

     print "hello";
     sleep 2;
     print "goodbye";
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on my Linux box (using perl 5.6) My output is:

     hellogoodbye <wait for 2 seconds>
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where I would expect

     hello<wait for 2 seconds>goodbye
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Now, if I change the script to (only adding \n):

     print "hello\n";
     sleep 2;
     print "goodbye";
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I get the expected result of:

     hello
     <wait 2 seconds>
     goodbye
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On my Win2k box, both scripts give the expected results. What's happening here?
Thanks!

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(jeffa) Re: Sleep behavior across platforms by jeffa (Bishop) on Mar 22, 2002 at 17:57 UTC
You are Suffering from Buffering! Try 'unbuffering' STDOUT by setting $\| to a true value: `$\| = 1; print "hello\n"; sleep 2; print "goodbye";` [download] jeffa L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L-- -R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B-- H---H---H---H---H---H--- (the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Sleep behavior across platforms by perrin (Chancellor) on Mar 22, 2002 at 18:57 UTC
I've slept on both Windows and Linux, and I definitely preferred the soft cushion provided by the Windows manual, though the CD-ROM dug into my back a little. However, if you print out the man pages that come with Linux they will keep you warm. Overall, I would say sleeping on either one is fairly pleasant.	[reply]