Re: named pipes blocking zsh

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Jun 1,  8:24am, Tim K. (Gmane) wrote:
}
} Now that I think about it, what if the pine process crashed and
} didn't have a chance to send an EOF or remove the pipe (assuming pine
} implemented the EOF)?

A crash that severe is by definition an unrecoverable error; it's not
possible to write code to handle it, and it's certainly not zsh's job
to attempt to handle unrecoverable errors in other arbitrary programs.

On Jun 1,  8:20am, Tim K. (Gmane) wrote:
} Subject: Re: named pipes blocking zsh
}
} What's interesting is that if I 'strace' the zsh process while it's 
} stuck (after the pipe was deleted), it will terminate.

That's almost certainly because strace sends a SIGPROF to zsh, which
interrupts whatever system call was blocking on the fifo.

I suspect that if you attempted something other than "kill -9" (such as,
say, "kill -1") you'd find that it *is* possible to politely interrupt
zsh when it's waiting on the fifo.