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Why stdbuf -oL pacman -S --noprogressbar?

Issue​

When running pacman commands in non-interactive environments, you might notice that the progress output appears to be stuck or delayed. This happens because:

  1. The progress bar is not visible in non-interactive shells
  2. With --noprogressbar flag, pacman skip the progress bar and append logs into stdout. However, it did not flush the buffer frequent enough.

Result: Output buffering causes progress updates to be delayed and then truncated.

Solution​

Use stdbuf -oL before the pacman command to force line buffering. The -oL flag tells stdbuf to use line buffering for stdout, which means each line of output will be flushed immediately.

stdbuf -oL pacman -S --noprogressbar