Hello, there are a few programs around that do something like printf("question: "); fgets(ans, sizeof ans, stdin); without fflushing stdout and get away with it because it happens to work under glibc. (fyi the ones I stumbled onto are mkfs.xfs and, vipw/vigr from util-linux, then the developer noticed the same with chfn/chsh) Ideally that would be taken care of by either some compiler warning (but not even clang's -Weverything catches that) or by some static analysis tool, but I couldn't find any. A __very__ tentative and untested patch: diff --git i/src/stdio/__stdio_read.c w/src/stdio/__stdio_read.c index ea675da3..6b10f76c 100644 --- i/src/stdio/__stdio_read.c +++ w/src/stdio/__stdio_read.c @@ -8,6 +8,11 @@ size_t __stdio_read(FILE *f, unsigned char *buf, size_t len) { .iov_base = f->buf, .iov_len = f->buf_size } }; ssize_t cnt; + if (f == stdin) { + if (stdout->wpos != stdout->wbase) { + do_something(glibc); + } + } cnt = iov[0].iov_len ? syscall(SYS_readv, f->fd, iov, 2) : syscall(SYS_read, f->fd, iov[1].iov_base, iov[1].iov_len); ... with do_something() being either flushing stdout or printing some kind of warning to stderr (isatty?) or to syslog. Any suggestion, corrections etc are obviously very welcome.