The main message of my previous post was that the buffering of the stdout can cause problems if we want to receive it from another process. Previous week (middle of March, 2010) my colleague was trying to use R (for statistical, analytical purposes) starting it as a command line tool and receiving data through the command line. He didn't get back data, but I encouraged him to keep on trying and checking out really the situation of the stdout.
What happened is that the data is there, but it got lost in the "pipes". The command line he used involved more outputs from stdouts, and the data finally gone. He could come up with a solution.