How to make output of any shell command unbuffered?

Question

Is there a way to run shell commands without output buffering?

For example, hexdump file | ./my_script will only pass input from hexdump to my_script in

Answer 1

You could also use the script command to make the output of hexdump line-buffered (hexdump will be run in a pseudo terminal which tricks hexdump into thinking its writing its stdout to a terminal, and not to a pipe).

# cf. http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/25372/turn-off-buffering-in-pipe/
stty -echo -onlcr
script -q /dev/null hexdump file | ./my_script         # FreeBSD, Mac OS X
script -q -c "hexdump file" /dev/null | ./my_script    # Linux
stty echo onlcr