Linux process synchronization

Hi,

If I have two processes I created (let's say I forked), and both are doing something like:

Code:

---

while (1)
  printf("my pid is %d\n",getpid());

---

The printouts never overlap. Instead each line is nicely printed.
This means that there is some kind of synchronization mechanism, protecting the stdout.
My question is how exactly is this done?
if I run ipcs -s, I will see no semaphores in the system, but if I write a code which pause() upon a signal, and attempt to synchronize processes with the signal, my printouts will eventually deadlock (and ipcs -s will show one semaphore...).

Thanks.

Stdout uses buffered i/o. When printf() finds a new-line character then it will flush the buffered output. I think that stderr is not buffered, so if you were to use fprintf(stderr,...) instead, I think you would get intermixed output. In any case, once the buffer for stdout is full, it will be flushed anyway, so if your output is large, it can still get intermixed.

Note that C++ output operators work the same way, and the endl i/o manipulator flushes the stream after inserting the new-line. IE:

Code:

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while (1)
    cout << "my pid is " << dec << getpid() << endl;

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should work the same way as your C example.