Live decoding? about iridium-toolkit

[Sec42]

This is more of a python/unix question & not really related to the iridium-toolkit.

Most programs on unix behave specially when their output is a terminal - Terminal output is usually "line buffered" i.e. the output is flushed/printed at each newline. Whereas for pipes you have the some (larger) standard buffer. On Linux it is about 64k bytes these days, i think.

So while piping there needs to be a larger amount of output before it is "flushed" and sent to the next program.

So your pipe should work as it is, but will only send output to udp-for-il.py in larger batches, which may - depending on the amount of traffic you see - take quite some time.

Different programs on unix have command line options to address this issue. For example for grep it is:

   --line-buffered
          Use line buffering on output.  This can cause a performance penalty.

For python one can use the -u option as shown in man python:

   -u     Force the stdout and stderr streams to be unbuffered.  This option has no effect on the stdin stream.

so your pipe would need to look like .... | python -u reassember.py -m sbd | udp-for-il.py

Technically, the same issue happens with iridium-parser.py in your pipeline, but as that one produces far more output, it is less noticable.