Jordan Geoghegan: > --- /tmp/bad.txt Wed Apr 14 21:06:51 2021 > +++ /tmp/good.txt Wed Apr 14 21:06:41 2021
I'll note that no characters have been lost between the two files. Only the order is different. > The only thing that changed between these runs was me using either xargs -P 1 > or -P 2. What do you expect? You run two processes in parallel that write to the same file. Obviously their output will be interspersed in unpredictable order. You seem to imagine that awk's output is line-buffered. But when it writes to a pipe or file, its output is block-buffered. This is default stdio behavior. Output is written in block-size increments (16 kB in practice) without regard to lines. So, yes, you can end up with a fragment from a line written by process #1, followed by lines from process #2, followed by the remainder of the line from #1, etc. -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber na...@mips.inka.de
