I have done this. Like you, this is something I used in most of my scripts.

Second, it could be in the $my_long_process program. Many programs, and the default stdio library, buffer output unless it's to a tty. If that's the case with $my_long_process program, it wouldn't buffer output when you ran it from the command-line (because it was connected to a tty), but would when run from your program. You might be able to test by running: $my_long_program |cat

It still gave me real-time feedback when run piped into cat as you suggested.

CT