I ran the following command from the command line: yum -d1 update 2>&1 | tee /tmp/yum.log and it stops printing at a partial line: tetex-xdvi i386 3.0-20.FC5 updates 866 k texinfo i386 4.8-9.2.fc5.1 updates 780 k tk i386 8.4.13-1.1 updates 886 k totem i386 1.4.1-1 updates 1.7 M tzdata noarch The update is still running, and I'm fairly certain that it will eventually complete successfully. However, at the moment the only output on the screen is partial. Would be good if this command flushed logging/diagnostic output at the end of line.