bash - Is echo atomic when writing single lines

Question

I am currently trying to get a script to write output from other started commands correctly into a log file. The script will write it's own messages to the log file using echo and there is a method to which I can pipe the lines from the other program.

The main problem is, that the program which produces the output is started in the background, so my function that does the read may write concurently to the logfile. Could this be a problem? Echo always only writes a single line, so it should not be to hard to ensure atomicity. However I have looked in google and I have found no way to make sure it actually is atomic.

Here is the current script:

LOG_FILE=/path/to/logfile

write_log() {
  echo "$(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S);$1" >> ${LOG_FILE}
}

write_output() {
  while read data; do
    write_log "Message from SUB process: [ $data ]"
  done
}

write_log "Script started"
# do some stuff
call_complicated_program 2>&1 | write_output &
SUB_PID=$!
#do some more stuff
write_log "Script exiting"
wait $SUB_PID

As you can see, the script might write both on it's own as well as because of redirected output. Could this cause havok in the file?

Answer 1

echo just a simple wrapper around write (this is a simplification; see edit below for the gory details), so to determine if echo is atomic, it's useful to look up write. From the single UNIX specification:

Atomic/non-atomic: A write is atomic if the whole amount written in one operation is not interleaved with data from any other process. This is useful when there are multiple writers sending data to a single reader. Applications need to know how large a write request can be expected to be performed atomically.This maximum is called {PIPE_BUF}. Thisvolume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 does not say whether write requests for more than {PIPE_BUF} bytes are atomic, but requires that writes of {PIPE_BUF}or fewer bytes shall be atomic.

You can check PIPE_BUF on your system with a simple C program. If you're just printing a single line of output, that is not ridiculously long, it should be atomic.

Here is a simple program to check the value of PIPE_BUF:

#include <limits.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
  printf("%d
", PIPE_BUF);

  return 0;
}

On Mac OS X, that gives me 512 (the minimum allowed value for PIPE_BUF). On Linux, I get 4096. So if your lines are fairly long, make sure you check it on the system in question.

edit to add: I decided to check the implementation of echo in Bash, to confirm that it will print atomically. It turns out, echo uses putchar or printf depending on whether you use the -e option. These are buffered stdio operations, which means that they fill up a buffer, and actually write it out only when a newline is reached (in line-buffered mode), the buffer is filled (in block-buffered mode), or you explicitly flush the output with fflush. By default, a stream will be in line buffered mode if it is an interactive terminal, and block buffered mode if it is any other file. Bash never sets the buffering type, so for your log file, it should default to block buffering mode. At then end of the echo builtin, Bash calls fflush to flush the output stream. Thus, the output will always be flushed at the end of echo, but may be flushed earlier if it doesn't fit into the buffer.

The size of the buffer used may be BUFSIZ, though it may be different; BUFSIZ is the default size if you set the buffer explicitly using setbuf, but there's no portable way to determine the actual the size of your buffer. There are also no portable guidelines for what BUFSIZ is, but when I tested it on Mac OS X and Linux, it was twice the size of PIPE_BUF.

What does this all mean? Since the output of echo is all buffered, it won't actually call the write until the buffer is filled or fflush is called. At that point, the output should be written, and the atomicity guarantee I mentioned above should apply. If the stdout buffer size is larger than PIPE_BUF, then PIPE_BUF will be the smallest atomic unit that can be written out. If PIPE_BUF is larger than the stdout buffer size, then the stream will write the buffer out when the buffer fills up.

So, echo is only guaranteed to atomically write sequences shorter than the smaller of PIPE_BUF and the size of the stdout buffer, which is most likely BUFSIZ. On most systems, BUFSIZ is larger that PIPE_BUF.

tl;dr: echo will atomically output lines, as long as those lines are short enough. On modern systems, you're probably safe up to 512 bytes, but it's not possible to determine the limit portably.