What is meant by stream buffering?

Question

I had started learning C programming, so I'm a beginner, while learning about standard streams of text, I came up with the lines "stdout" stream is buffered while "stderr" stream is not buffered, but I am not able to make sense with this lines.

I already have read about "buffer" on this forum and I like candy analogy, but I am not able to figure out what is meant when one says: "This stream is buffered and the other one is not." What is the effect?

What is the difference?

Update: Does it affect the speed of processing?

Answer 1

Buffer is a block of memory which belongs to a stream and is used to hold stream data temporarily. When the first I/O operation occurs on a file, malloc is called and a buffer is obtained. Characters that are written to a stream are normally accumulated in the buffer (before being transmitted to the file in chunks), instead of appearing as soon as they are output by the application program. Similarly, streams retrieve input from the host environment in blocks rather than on a character-by-character basis. This is done to increase efficiency, as file and console I/O is slow in comparison to memory operations.

GCC provides three types of buffering - unbuffered, block buffered, and line buffered. Unbuffered means that characters appear on the destination file as soon as written (for an output stream), or input is read from a file on a character-by-character basis instead of reading in blocks (for input streams). Block buffered means that characters are saved up in the buffer and written or read as a block. Line buffered means that characters are saved up only till a newline is written into or read from the buffer. stdin and stdout are block buffered if and only if they can be determined not to refer to an interactive device else they are line buffered (this is true of any stream). stderr is always unbuffered by default.

The standard library provides functions to alter the default behaviour of streams. You can use fflush to force the data out of the output stream buffer (fflush is undefined for input streams). You can make the stream unbuffered using the setbuf function.