This document is a Mac OS X manual page. Manual pages are a command-line technology for providing documentation. You can view these manual pages locally using the man(1) command. These manual pages come from many different sources, and thus, have a variety of writing styles.

For more information about the manual page format, see the manual page for manpages(5).

SETBUF(3)                BSD Library Functions Manual                SETBUF(3)

NAME
     setbuf, setbuffer, setlinebuf, setvbuf -- stream buffering operations

LIBRARY
     Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS
     #include <stdio.h>

     void
     setbuf(FILE *restrict stream, char *restrict buf);

     void
     setbuffer(FILE *stream, char *buf, int size);

     int
     setlinebuf(FILE *stream);

     int
     setvbuf(FILE *restrict stream, char *restrict buf, int type, size_t size);

DESCRIPTION
     Three types of buffering are available: unbuffered, block buffered, and line buffered.  When an output
     stream is unbuffered, information appears on the destination file or terminal as soon as written; when
     it is block buffered, many characters are saved up and written as a block; when it is line buffered,
     characters are saved up until a newline is output or input is read from any stream attached to a termi-nal terminal
     nal device (typically stdin).  The function fflush(3) may be used to force the block out early.  (See
     fclose(3).)

     Normally, all files are block buffered.  When the first I/O operation occurs on a file, malloc(3) is
     called and an optimally-sized buffer is obtained.  If a stream refers to a terminal (as stdout normally
     does), it is line buffered.  The standard error stream stderr is always unbuffered.

     The setvbuf() function may be used to alter the buffering behavior of a stream.  The type argument must
     be one of the following three macros:

           _IONBF  unbuffered

           _IOLBF  line buffered

           _IOFBF  fully buffered

     The size argument may be given as zero to obtain deferred optimal-size buffer allocation as usual.  If
     it is not zero, then except for unbuffered files, the buf argument should point to a buffer at least
     size bytes long; this buffer will be used instead of the current buffer.  If buf is not NULL, it is the
     caller's responsibility to free(3) this buffer after closing the stream.  (If the size argument is not
     zero but buf is NULL, a buffer of the given size will be allocated immediately, and released on close.
     This is an extension to ANSI C; portable code should use a size of 0 with any NULL buffer.)

     The setvbuf() function may be used at any time, but may have peculiar side effects (such as discarding
     input or flushing output) if the stream is ``active''.  Portable applications should call it only once
     on any given stream, and before any I/O is performed.

     The other three calls are, in effect, simply aliases for calls to setvbuf().  Except for the lack of a
     return value, the setbuf() function is exactly equivalent to the call

           setvbuf(stream, buf, buf ? _IOFBF : _IONBF, BUFSIZ);

     The setbuffer() function is the same, except that the size of the buffer is up to the caller, rather
     than being determined by the default BUFSIZ.  The setlinebuf() function is exactly equivalent to the
     call:

           setvbuf(stream, (char *)NULL, _IOLBF, 0);

RETURN VALUES
     The setvbuf() function returns 0 on success, or EOF if the request cannot be honored (note that the
     stream is still functional in this case).

     The setlinebuf() function returns what the equivalent setvbuf() would have returned.

SEE ALSO
     fclose(3), fopen(3), fread(3), malloc(3), printf(3), puts(3)

STANDARDS
     The setbuf() and setvbuf() functions conform to ISO/IEC 9899:1990 (``ISO C90'').

BUGS
     The setbuffer() and setlinebuf() functions are not portable to versions of BSD before 4.2BSD.  On
     4.2BSD and 4.3BSD systems, setbuf() always uses a suboptimal buffer size and should be avoided.

BSD                              June 4, 1993                              BSD