#!perl6
use v6;
my $message = "\nHello!\n\nSleep\nTest\n\n";
my #a = $message.split( '' );
for #a {
sleep 0.3;
.print;
}
Does perl6 enable "autoflush" by default. With perl5 without enabling "outflush" I don't get this behavior.
Rakudo enables autoflush by default; the specification is silent about the default.
Quoting from the docs regarding auto flush:
‘No global alternative available. TTY handles are unbuffered by default, for others, set out-buffer to zero or use :!out-buffer with open on a specific IO::Handle.’
So any printing to stdout is unbuffered and I guess would behave similar to auto flushed stdout of perl5.
Other handles depend on the out-buffer size set.
Related
With a snippet like
# Contents of ./run
my $p = Proc::Async.new: #*ARGS;
react {
whenever Promise.in: 5 { $p.kill }
whenever $p.stdout { say "OUT: { .chomp }" }
whenever $p.ready { say "PID: $_" }
whenever $p.start { say "Done" }
}
executed like
./run raku -e 'react whenever Supply.interval: 1 { .say }'
I expected to see something like
PID: 1234
OUT: 0
OUT: 1
OUT: 2
OUT: 3
OUT: 4
Done
but instead I see
PID: 1234
OUT: 0
Done
I understand that this has to do with buffering: if I change that command into something like
# The $|++ disables buffering
./run perl -E '$|++; while(1) { state $i; say $i++; sleep 1 }'
I get the desired output.
I know that TTY IO::Handle objects are unbuffered, and that in this case the $*OUT of the spawned process is not one. And I've read that IO::Pipe objects are buffered "so that a write without a read doesn't immediately block" (although I cannot say I entirely understand what this means).
But no matter what I've tried, I cannot get the unbuffered output stream of a Proc::Async. How do I do this?
I've tried binding an open IO::Handle using $proc.bind-stdout but I still get the same issue.
Note that doing something like $proc.bind-stdout: $*OUT does work, in the sense that the Proc::Async object no longer buffers, but it's also not a solution to my problem, because I cannot tap into the output before it goes out. It does suggest to me that if I can bind the Proc::Async to an unbuffered handle, it should do the right thing. But I haven't been able to get that to work either.
For clarification: as suggested with the Perl example, I know I can fix this by disabling the buffering on the command I'll be passing as input, but I'm looking for a way to do this from the side that creates the Proc::Async object.
You can set the .out-buffer of a handle (such as $*OUT or $*ERR) to 0:
$ ./run raku -e '$*OUT.out-buffer = 0; react whenever Supply.interval: 1 { .say }'
PID: 11340
OUT: 0
OUT: 1
OUT: 2
OUT: 3
OUT: 4
Done
Proc::Async itself isn't performing buffering on the received data. However, spawned processes may do their own depending on what they are outputting to, and that's what is being observed here.
Many programs make decisions about their output buffering (among other things, such as whether to emit color codes) based on whether the output handle is attached to a TTY (a terminal). The assumption is that a TTY means a human is going to be watching the output, and thus latency is preferable to throughput, so buffering is disabled (or restricted to line buffering). If, on the other hand, the output is going to a pipe or a file, then the assumption is that latency is not so important, and buffering is used to achieve a significant throughput win (a lot less system calls to write data).
When we spawn something with Proc::Async, the standard output of the spawned process is bound to a pipe - which is not a TTY. Thus the invoked program may use this to decide to apply output buffering.
If you're willing to have another dependency, then you can invoke the program via. something that fakes up a TTY, such as unbuffer (part of the expect package, it seems). Here's an example of a program that is suffering from buffering:
my $proc = Proc::Async.new: 'raku', '-e',
'react whenever Supply.interval(1) { .say }';
react whenever $proc.stdout {
.print
}
We only see a 0 and then have to wait a long time for more output. Running it via unbuffer:
my $proc = Proc::Async.new: 'unbuffer', 'raku', '-e',
'react whenever Supply.interval(1) { .say }';
react whenever $proc.stdout {
.print
}
Means that we see a number output every second.
Could Raku provide a built-in solution to this some day? Yes - by doing the "magic" that unbuffer itself does (I presume allocating a pty - kind of a fake TTY). This isn't trivial - although it is being explored by the libuv developers; at least so far as Rakudo on MoarVM goes, the moment there's a libuv release available offering such a feature, we'll work on exposing it.
I am aware of two methods of determining whether my app is in running in debug mode:
const bool.fromEnvironment("dart.vm.product") returns true if release.
And this from the Sentry part of the Flutter docs:
bool get isInDebugMode {
// Assume we're in production mode
bool inDebugMode = false;
// Assert expressions are only evaluated during development. They are ignored
// in production. Therefore, this code will only turn `inDebugMode` to true
// in our development environments!
assert(inDebugMode = true);
return inDebugMode;
}
Are those two always equivalent or are there situations where they would give different answers? Which should I use? The first method being compile time seems to favour it.
In general they should be the same, but there can be differences.
const bool.fromEnvironment("dart.vm.product") depends on release build being performed. I haven't checked if profile build returns true or false
assert(inDebugMode = true); depends on asserts being enabled.
asserts are enabled in debug mode by default and disabled in release builds by default but there should be a way to enable/disable asserts independently of release/debug mode, but I haven't found how. Perhaps it's not exposed in Flutter or it is not implemented in Dart yet.
I'd think bool.fromEnvironment() works better with tree-shaking because it can be used to create a const value.
I am using Verilator to incorporate an algorithm written in SystemVerilog into an executable utility that manipulates I/O streams passed via stdin and stdout. Unfortunately, when I use the SystemVerilog $display() function, the output goes to stdout. I would like it to go to stderr so that stdout remains uncontaminated for my other purposes.
How can I make this happen?
Thanks to #toolic for pointing out the existence of $fdisplay(), which can be used thusly...
$fdisplay(STDERR,"hello world"); // also supports formatted arguments
IEEE Std 1800-2012 states that STDERR should be pre-opened, but it did not seem to be known to Verilator. A workaround for this is:
integer STDERR = 32'h8000_0002;
Alternatively, you can create a log file handle for use with $fdisplay() like so...
integer logfile;
initial begin
$system("echo 'initial at ['$(date)']'>>temp.log");
logfile = $fopen("temp.log","a"); // or open with "w" to start fresh
end
It might be nice if you could create a custom wrapper that works like $display but uses your selected file descriptor (without specifying it every time). Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be possible within the language itself -- but maybe you can do it with the DPI, see DPI Display Functions (I haven't gotten this to work so far).
How can I limit the output to the F# Interactive console to my own output?
In my current setup the fsi writes lots of information (on types and content of the data structures) as it runs through the script.
I have tried the quiet mode without success.
Thanks!
You can set ShowDeclarationValues, ShowProperties, and ShowIEnumerable to false.
You may still see types, but not content (which is generally the bulk of the output).
#if INTERACTIVE
fsi.ShowDeclarationValues <- false
fsi.ShowProperties <- false
fsi.ShowIEnumerable <- false
#endif
Another unconventional method might be the following:
fire your FSI with --quiet option
instead of printf use eprintf for your own output, the effect would be exactly what you asked for
in the script
eprintfn "Testing: %n" 123
in FSI window
Testing: 123
Any other, but real error messages output simply will not appear in the FSI window, including all evaluation results; at the same time all conveniences of printf are still available to you, including familiar formatting.
UPDATE: I posted a further enhancement allowing use of unchanged output code for both normal and "quiet" modes of FSI output.
I wrote the following two functions, and call the second ("callAndWait") from JavaScript running inside Windows Script Host. My overall intent is to call one command line program from another. That is, I'm running the initial scripting using cscript, and then trying to run something else (Ant) from that script.
function readAllFromAny(oExec)
{
if (!oExec.StdOut.AtEndOfStream)
return oExec.StdOut.ReadLine();
if (!oExec.StdErr.AtEndOfStream)
return "STDERR: " + oExec.StdErr.ReadLine();
return -1;
}
// Execute a command line function....
function callAndWait(execStr) {
var oExec = WshShell.Exec(execStr);
while (oExec.Status == 0)
{
WScript.Sleep(100);
var output;
while ( (output = readAllFromAny(oExec)) != -1) {
WScript.StdOut.WriteLine(output);
}
}
}
Unfortunately, when I run my program, I don't get immediate feedback about what the called program is doing. Instead, the output seems to come in fits and starts, sometimes waiting until the original program has finished, and sometimes it appears to have deadlocked. What I really want to do is have the spawned process actually share the same StdOut as the calling process, but I don't see a way to do that. Just setting oExec.StdOut = WScript.StdOut doesn't work.
Is there an alternate way to spawn processes that will share the StdOut & StdErr of the launching process? I tried using "WshShell.Run(), but that gives me a "permission denied" error. That's problematic, because I don't want to have to tell my clients to change how their Windows environment is configured just to run my program.
What can I do?
You cannot read from StdErr and StdOut in the script engine in this way, as there is no non-blocking IO as Code Master Bob says. If the called process fills up the buffer (about 4KB) on StdErr while you are attempting to read from StdOut, or vice-versa, then you will deadlock/hang. You will starve while waiting for StdOut and it will block waiting for you to read from StdErr.
The practical solution is to redirect StdErr to StdOut like this:
sCommandLine = """c:\Path\To\prog.exe"" Argument1 argument2"
Dim oExec
Set oExec = WshShell.Exec("CMD /S /C "" " & sCommandLine & " 2>&1 """)
In other words, what gets passed to CreateProcess is this:
CMD /S /C " "c:\Path\To\prog.exe" Argument1 argument2 2>&1 "
This invokes CMD.EXE, which interprets the command line. /S /C invokes a special parsing rule so that the first and last quote are stripped off, and the remainder used as-is and executed by CMD.EXE. So CMD.EXE executes this:
"c:\Path\To\prog.exe" Argument1 argument2 2>&1
The incantation 2>&1 redirects prog.exe's StdErr to StdOut. CMD.EXE will propagate the exit code.
You can now succeed by reading from StdOut and ignoring StdErr.
The downside is that the StdErr and StdOut output get mixed together. As long as they are recognisable you can probably work with this.
Another technique which might help in this situation is to redirect the standard error stream of the command to accompany the standard output.
Do this by adding "%comspec% /c" to the front and "2>&1" to the end of the execStr string.
That is, change the command you run from:
zzz
to:
%comspec% /c zzz 2>&1
The "2>&1" is a redirect instruction which causes the StdErr output (file descriptor 2) to be written to the StdOut stream (file descriptor 1).
You need to include the "%comspec% /c" part because it is the command interpreter which understands about the command line redirect. See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee156605.aspx
Using "%comspec%" instead of "cmd" gives portability to a wider range of Windows versions.
If your command contains quoted string arguments, it may be tricky to get them right:
the specification for how cmd handles quotes after "/c" seems to be incomplete.
With this, your script needs only to read the StdOut stream, and will receive both standard output and standard error.
I used this with "net stop wuauserv", which writes to StdOut on success (if the service is running)
and StdErr on failure (if the service is already stopped).
First, your loop is broken in that it always tries to read from oExec.StdOut first. If there is no actual output then it will hang until there is. You wont see any StdErr output until StdOut.atEndOfStream becomes true (probably when the child terminates). Unfortunately, there is no concept of non-blocking I/O in the script engine. That means calling read and having it return immediately if there is no data in the buffer. Thus there is probably no way to get this loop to work as you want. Second, WShell.Run does not provide any properties or methods to access the standard I/O of the child process. It creates the child in a separate window, totally isolated from the parent except for the return code. However, if all you want is to be able to SEE the output from the child then this might be acceptable. You will also be able to interact with the child (input) but only through the new window (see SendKeys).
As for using ReadAll(), this would be even worse since it collects all the input from the stream before returning so you wouldn't see anything at all until the stream was closed. I have no idea why the example places the ReadAll in a loop which builds a string, a single if (!WScript.StdIn.AtEndOfStream) should be sufficient to avoid exceptions.
Another alternative might be to use the process creation methods in WMI. How standard I/O is handled is not clear and there doesn't appear to be any way to allocate specific streams as StdIn/Out/Err. The only hope would be that the child would inherit these from the parent but that's what you want, isn't it? (This comment based upon an idea and a little bit of research but no actual testing.)
Basically, the scripting system is not designed for complicated interprocess communication/synchronisation.
Note: Tests confirming the above were performed on Windows XP Sp2 using Script version 5.6. Reference to current (5.8) manuals suggests no change.
Yes, the Exec function seems to be broken when it comes to terminal output.
I have been using a similar function function ConsumeStd(e) {WScript.StdOut.Write(e.StdOut.ReadAll());WScript.StdErr.Write(e.StdErr.ReadAll());} that I call in a loop similar to yours. Not sure if checking for EOF and reading line by line is better or worse.
You might have hit the deadlock issue described on this Microsoft Support site.
One suggestion is to always read both from stdout and stderr.
You could change readAllFromAny to:
function readAllFromAny(oExec)
{
var output = "";
if (!oExec.StdOut.AtEndOfStream)
output = output + oExec.StdOut.ReadLine();
if (!oExec.StdErr.AtEndOfStream)
output = output + "STDERR: " + oExec.StdErr.ReadLine();
return output ? output : -1;
}