bfr
Most recent version is 1.6, which was released on 2004-03-03. I haven't actually paid any attention to this software in a long time, so be warned.
Changes
- Added a transferred total to the progress bar (thanks, Gerard Saraber!)
- various cleanups and bugfixes (should now compile on *BSD, too)
Download
| link | md5sum |
| bfr-1.6.tar.bz2 | a1aef17a259d78e81f133c149e2dbb80 |
Completely disregardable pile of english words:
Buffer is a general-purpose command-line pipe buffer. It buffers data from stdin and sends it to stdout, adjusting to best fit the pace stdout can handle. It can solve problems on either end of a pipe. For instance, if the incoming stream is slower than outgoing, performance is mainly dependent on the “start-stream threshold” you set. This can be used to group data into larger packets to, for an example, reduce seeking on a tape drive. In the case of the outgoing being slower, the “stop-stream threshold” prevents unnecessary CPU from being taken up by reading single-bytes and such (if the output stream accepts data one byte at a time, for instance), and will output-only until the buffer goes down to 97% or so. This speeds up certain procedures, such as creating a tar file, gzipping it, and putting it through a program such as “netcat”. It boosts performance by allowing a certain level of detachment between the two… allowing tar and (especially) gzip to do its work at the same time the network is doing its work, so you're not sending one packet and THEN seeing gzip kick in to create the next.
The Buffer distribution also contains a varient of buffer named Bufplay (bfp). Bufplay's purpose is to do the same sort of buffering as Buffer, but it is intended for use with OSS, configuring /dev/dsp for the type of sound data you specify and playing it. Yes, OSS is old. Patches to convert to ALSA or jackd are welcome.
