I'm fully aware of that, and that's why I wrote by default. It's completely irrelevant for the program I was replying to, as it wasn't writing to different filehandles, and then outside of the program merging them again. It was writing to STDOUT, and nothing else. If it was being redirected to a file, you don't need to unbuffer.

But my beef wasn't so much about the unbuffering. It was about the idiom that should never have been cargo culted into widespread use.

Yes, and I know who to blame.