> read() with size 1 FYI shells do this when reading line-by-line from non-seekable streams (e.g. pipes). It's not really feasible to do buffer I/O when you ha

> read() with size 1 FYI shells do this when reading line-by-line from non-seekable streams (e.g. pipes). It's not really feasible to do buffer I/O when you have subprocesses around, and you can't just ungetc(3) into arbitrary file descriptors. A potential performance worth nothing IMO—that is, if you ever do text processing with a bunch of read commands and not sed/awk/whatever like a normal person. Of course this doesn't apply to seekable files, but it still has to rewind back to immediately after the last newline character so there's that.