Bfr 1.6 - General-purpose command-line pipe buffer.

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 variant 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. If, for some reason, you want to be cool like me and have 60 megs of RAM inbetween mpg123 and your sound card, you can. =).