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From: "John Chatelle" <johnch AT medent DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: RE: tee piping to head gives error message
Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 08:09:45 -0500
Message-Id: <20050208130407.M2469@medent.com>
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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.
> 
------- Cut -------


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