you don't really want to get "write error" printed from every
process in a pipe line such as
	slowly-compute-big-file | dosomemore | andyetmore | sed -n '/something/;p;q'
or even
	slowly-compute-big-file | badusageofsomething
where the latter prints a "usage" message and quits.
you want to make sure the previous commands in the pipeline stop, right away.
(they might be in a script. they might even be costing money.)

actually, if i were looking for something exceptional to fix,
i'd get linux and the BSDs to stop thinking they still
need character and block "special files" as special
types of files in a physical file system, to represent devices.