Null flush

Null flush is an option (-z) to most Apertium programs (and programs compatible with Apertium stream format) that flushes the output buffer upon receiving the \0 character instead of on end-of-file. This allows programs which call Apertium externally to keep a translator online, meaning they can avoid startup time for every translation.

To see how to use this in practice, read Daemon.

Testing

If you want to test that a pipe handles null flush correctly, you can use something like:

cat <(echo -e "this\0is\0a\0test\0") /dev/stdin | your -z | pipe -z | goes -z | here -z

where \0 are the nulls. Use Ctrl-D (^D) to close the inpue that cat keeps open.