Mail Archives: cygwin/2005/02/08/08:10:32
Don't break head.
We won't want "Argument list too long" when piping a stream to head.
---------- Original Message -----------
From: "Buchbinder, Barry (To: cygwin-cygwin.com
Sent: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 13:49:49 -0500
Subject: RE: tee piping to head gives error message
> At Monday, February 07, 2005 1:13 PM, Dave Korn wrote:
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: cygwin-owner On Behalf Of Buchbinder, Barry (NIH/NIAID)
> >> Sent: 07 February 2005 17:28
> >
> >> As described in the Subject. Though it seems that everything works
> >> OK; tee just gives and error message under some circumstances.
> >>
> >> /tmp> cat stafflist.htm | tee ttt | head > /dev/null
> >> tee: standard output: Broken pipe
> >
> >> So the file that tee write looks good and the write error is
> >> only to the pipe.
> >
> > That'll be because head closed the pipe, and tee was still trying
> > to write into it.
>
> Further experimentation supported that. Inserting cat between tee
> and head did not eliminate the error message, while inserting sort did.
>
> >> So head seems to be passing on the number of lines that ones
> >> asks it to pass on.
> >
> > Given that the purpose of head is to print the first few lines of a
> > file, it kind of makes sense to me that it would close the file after
> > it's read them rather than keeping the input file open and manually
> > reading-and-discarding the entire rest of it for no good reason.
>
> Agreed.
>
> > So I reckon this is as-expected and by-design behaviour.
>
> with the upstream maintainers, or to patch himself. (I won't
> complain if he doesn't patch it. Taking on coreutils was quite a
> commitment -- well deserving of the two gold stars -- and I know
> that fixing this may be a low priority.) Unfortunately, though PTC,
> I'm not capable of providing a patch. In any case, tee seems to save
> its input as desired, so while the error message is annoying and
> misleading, I suppose that one can live with it.
>
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