mjhjmtu

I'm playing around with xinput to watch keyboard events.
I'd like to transform the output with awk and pass it to tee, printing to stdout and writing to a file simultaneously.

I watch events on device 14, type a single Space, then type Ctrl+C to exit:

$ xinput test 14
key release 36
key press 65
 key release 65
key press 37
key press 54
^C

I can transform this with awk:

$ xinput test 14 | awk ' print $NF '
36
65
 65
37
54
^C

Or I can pipe it to tee:

$ xinput test 14 | tee a.log
key release 36
key press 65
 key release 65
key press 37
key press 54
^C

$ cat a.log
key release 36
key press 65
 key release 65
key press 37
key press 54

But I can't pipe the transformed output to tee:

$ xinput test 14 | awk ' print $NF ' | tee b.log
^C

$ cat b.log

I think I understand what's going on, and can boil it down to a simpler example where I cat stdin to tr and pipe that to tee.

$ cat | tr a x | tee x.log

If I type A B Enter, then Ctrl+C, the pipeline aborts before printing to stdout or writing to x.log (though the file itself is created):

ab
^C

$ cat x.log

If I type Ctrl+D instead of Ctrl+C, an EOF character signals the end of input, and output gets printed to stdout and written to x.log:

ab
xb

$ cat x.log
xb

I've tried a couple different approaches, but so far no success.

$ awk ' print $NF ' ; > >(tee x.log)

$ exec fd> >(tee x.log)
$ xinput test 14 | awk ' print $NF ' >& $fd
$ exec fd>&-

$ exec > >(tee x.log)
$ xinput test 14 | awk ' print $NF '

Can this be done?

I found two solutions.

1. 
   

   Use stdbuf to run awk with no output buffering.

   
   
   

   xinput test 14 | stdbuf -o0 awk ' print $NF ' | tee b.log

   
   


2. 
   

   Add system("") call within the awk script

   
   
   

   xinput test 14 | awk ' print $NF; system("") ' | tee b.log