On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 12:03 PM, John Mendenhall <j...@surfutopia.net> wrote: >> On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 2:19 PM, John Mendenhall <j...@surfutopia.net> wrote: >> > I have several openbsd 4.4 boxes, all of which are running >> > spamd. I have a cron job which runs a script, which has the >> > following commands in it: >> >> Well, sort is obviously calling fwrite to write on stdout, which >> head reads. When head has had enough, it closes its input, >> which is from the pipe. fwrite then terminates with an EPIPE >> error, which sort is not (seemingly) handling properly. (Looks >> like it is calling warn(3) or err(3).) Maybe sort(3) is not complaining >> if isatty(fileno(stdout)). Only the source knows for sure.
Not quite. cron is invoking programs with SIGPIPE ignored, thus the reported behavior from sort. I don't see this (the ignoring) on the other systems I have access to and don't see anything in the standard that would call for that, so I think this is a bug in our cron. I encourage the OP to use sendbug to submit a report for this so we don't lose track of it. >> The mystery to me is why the error message does not appear >> when the pipe is run on a tty. (I can duplicate your error easily). Because it gets SIGPIPE and exits quietly. Philip Guenther
