From the Suffering from Buffering article, link in comment below, we get the line: "The blocks on your disk are probably about 8K bytes."

Using that, and your original, non '\n', case, plus the sleep of 1 second, we get:

   8K = 8 * 1024 = 8192 bytes
   'test' = 4 bytes
   8192/4 = 2048 = # of times output will need to happen before you se
+e anything due to buffering.
   2048 * 1 second sleeps between each output = 2048 seconds
   2048 / 60 seconds per minute = 34.1333 minutes to wait.
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-Scott