I'm confused. Is my english so bad that no-one understands what I'm asking or is my understanding of SIGPIPE wrong?
> Can't you just close() the pipe? Yes, of course. I wrote: EF> Of course, when the tail exits, the head will get SIGPIPE as soon as it EF> tries to output something, but can the tail explicitly kill it earlier? So yes, closing the tail of the pipe will deliver a SIGPIPE to the head, but only as soon as it writes to the pipe, no? I was asking for a method to kill it even before it next tries to write something to the pipe. I was asked about the context and what I was really trying to do. I didn't give the context because I thaught it was irrelevant. What I was really trying to do is partly trying to learn. So the context is a collectd exec plugin translating envstat output to collectd PUTVALs. The structure is about envstat -i 10 | while read ... ... printf "PUTVAL ... || exit 1 ... done Now the problem is that collectd sets a handler to ignore SIGPIPE, that's inherited to the exec'd plugin (I could change that, after all, it's Open Source), so envstat continues to run. After I realized what the problem was (SIGPIPE ignored), I thought what to do and the obvious solution (apart from patching collectd) is to trap - PIPE before calling envstat. But since that would make envstat continue to run until it next tries to output something, I was asking myself whether there was a more elegant solution where I could explicitly kill envstat from within the while loop instead. Of course, the question is not really relevant to envstat -i, but maybe I'll be facing a similar situation in the future where the head must be killed because no two incarnations may run at once or letting it continue is expensive or whatnot.
