Re: broken pipe
On Mon, 9 Jun 1997, Rick Macdonald wrote:
> On Mon, 9 Jun 1997, Tim O'Brien wrote:
> > Ok, I finally have to break down and ask a potential dumb question: What
> > the heck is a 'broken pipe'? I get these from time to time on my Debian box.
>
> A pipe is when the standard output of one program is fed to the standard
> input of another. These types of programs are commonly called "filters".
> Even DOS has them.
I most frequently see 'broken pipe' when I run some process and pipe the
output into 'less' just to check that the output looks ok, and then I
'quit' instead of moving to the end first.
It's perhaps worth pointing out to a DOS plumber that although in DOS the
first process will have completed before you quit from less (indeed,
before you see anything emerge into less, because DOS fakes pipes with
temporary files), this isn't so in unix because the first program was
running in concurrently with the second. When you quit from less, the
output of the first program just stops a little way beyond your
high-watermark, typically at a disk block boundary.
--
David Wright, Open University, Earth Science Department, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA
U.K. email: d.wright@open.ac.uk tel: +44 1908 653 739 fax: +44 1908 655 151
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