using STDIN that has no line breaks

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

Is there a way to handle output from another program that does not use line breaks in some of it's output?

I am piping Rsync's output to a perl script so that I can see Rsync's file transfers as they happen. The problem is that Rsync outputs the file transfer progress without line breaks, and only sends a line break after each transfer is complete. I think Rsync does this so that when you run in from the command line the percentage number just changes instead of filling your terminal screen with lots of lines. So I want to be able to view the <STDIN> data before the final line break is sent. Any ideas?

Or should I scrap this idea and just send the output of Rsync to a log file and have Perl evaluate the tail of the log file every few seconds?

Thanks!

Comment on using STDIN that has no line breaks

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Re: using STDIN that has no line breaks by ig (Vicar) on Mar 08, 2009 at 23:30 UTC
You might find File::Rsync or File::RsyncP helpful.	[reply]
Re: using STDIN that has no line breaks by Illuminatus (Curate) on Mar 08, 2009 at 23:51 UTC
You could also experiment with changing $RS from newline to carriage-return. The 'precentage progress' that continually updates the same line is done via carriage-return. However, I don't know if you get the CR at the 100% mark.	[reply]
Re: using STDIN that has no line breaks by Anonymous Monk on Mar 08, 2009 at 22:07 UTC
Any ideas? use read instead of readline	[reply]
Re: using STDIN that has no line breaks by jplindstrom (Monsignor) on Mar 09, 2009 at 13:41 UTC
What other people said to solve your specific problem. Or in general: look at the variable $/ (the input record separator, newline by default. This influences Perl's idea of what a "line" is) in perlvar (`perldoc perlvar` from the command line). /J	[reply] [d/l]
Re: using STDIN that has no line breaks by macguide (Initiate) on Mar 09, 2009 at 16:47 UTC
Thanks everyone. I ended up setting $/ = "\r" and that worked great. I will also look into File::Rsync & File::RsyncP for greater control.	[reply]