popen question

[Robert Latest]

Hrvoje Niksic wrote:

> stdio uses different buffering strategies depending on the output
> type.  When the output is a TTY, line buffering is used; when the
> output goes to a pipe or file, it is fully buffered.

Makes sense.

> If you see lines one by one, you are in luck, and you can fix things
> on the Python level simply by avoiding buffering in popen.  If not,
> you will need to resort to more advanced hackery (e.g. fixing stdio
> using LD_PRELOAD).

Do I really? After all, the shell itself doesn't hack stdio, does it?
Anyway, I'm taking this over to comp.unix.programmer since it really isn't a 
python problem.

Thanks,
robert