I'm using Boost 1.43.0, and I've found that filtering_ostream does not flush "std::cout".  I found a relevant (and recent) ticket against Boost 1.44.0, but my issue is slightly different.  https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/ticket/4590 I'm using GCC 4.3.4 on Gentoo Linux. I'm hoping that I'm just doing something wrong, but if you think there's a bug, I'll add my testcase to the ticket. The basic recipe: filtering_ostream out; out.push(any_filter_at_all()); out.push(std::cout); out << "Hello World!" << std::flush; sleep(10); // Observe an empty console. std::cout << std::flush; sleep(10); // Observe printed text on console. This problem is quite bad for me when doing the following on the command-line (for a more complicated program): ./program 2>&1 | tee some-file.log Because stdout is not getting flushed, the stdout and stderr get intermingled strangely. However, disabling buffering on stdout works around the problem: stdbuf --output=0 ./program 2>&1 | tee some-file.log Please tell me if you think there's a bug in my code. If it's a bug in Boost.Iostreams (or I'm expecting the wrong behaviour), I would appreciate any ideas for workarounds (I tried cout.setf(unitbuf), and that doesn't seem to do the trick). Here's the full text of my code: ------------------ // Test case for flushing a filtering_ostream based on the // boost_iostreams_filtering_ostream.cpp attached to ticket #4950: // https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/ticket/4590 // https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/attachment/ticket/4590/boost_iostreams_filt... // changed to use "cout" as the sink. // // Flushing a filtering_ostream using the flush() global function does not work // in Boost 1.43. I suspect it also does not work in Boost 1.44. // // Using GCC-4.3.4 on Gentoo Linux. // #include <cassert> #include <string> #include #include #include #include <iostream> // Included for "sleep()" call below. #include namespace io = boost::iostreams; // Simple output filter forwarding just forwarding the put chars to // the sink. struct transparent_output_filter { typedef char char_type; typedef io::output_filter_tag category; template <typename Sink> bool put(Sink& snk, char c) { return io::put(snk, c); } }; int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { using namespace std; io::filtering_streamio::output out; // Transparent filter just forward the characters to the sink. // // Note: I observe this behaviour with and without this line. out.push(transparent_output_filter()); // Sink appends characters to "cout". out.push(cout); // Write test string to filtering_ostream. out << "Hello World!"; // On my system, this will flush the buffer iff I'm on an // interactive console. "\n" and endl have the same effect. I believe // that my shell sets "stdout" to be line-buffered if it's interactive. // out << "\n"; bool wasFlushed = false; // The flush does *not* work in Boost 1.43. wasFlushed = io::flush(out); // This assertion does not go off, though. assert(wasFlushed); // This also doesn't work. wasFlushed = out.flush(); assert(wasFlushed); // This also doesn't work. out << std::flush; // Demonstrate that none of the above flush calls had any effect on "cout". sleep(10); // Now we finally get the characters on the console. cout << flush; // Demonstrate that the direct flush call works when called directly on // "cout". sleep(10); return 0; }