What part is nonsense? When you print to a file, it doesn't automatically write to disk that instant. That would be inefficient. An example: you have a script that prints some log file to keep track of the script's progress. Unless you activate autoflush, you can't be certain that the log file represents the current status of the running script. In fact, sometimes the data destined for the log file might not be written at all until the script is completely finished executing.