RE: buffering woes

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Hal Daume III writes:

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Not for me, GHC 5.04.2 (Solaris).

here it goes right the first time, but then i have to type two more letters (in this case 'b\n') to get it to respond to "hello".

Solaris has a slightly bizarre buffering scheme in "raw" terminal mode, whereby it buffers 4 characters at a time, instead of passing on each character immediately. Try

stty -icanon min 1

(or something similar) to fix it?

Someone must have failed setting the tty mode. :-) The 4 is (if I remember right) the VMIN value which is stored in the same place as the EOF (^D = 4) character. It has to be set to 0 when placing the tty in raw mode.

Bingo. Now fixed, thanks all. Cheers, Simon