Re: named pipes blocking zsh

["Tim K. (Gmane)" <tk-gmane+at@idpax.com>]

What's interesting is that if I 'strace' the zsh process while it's 
stuck (after the pipe was deleted), it will terminate. I'm not sure what 
the explanation behind it is ...

Thanks.

Tim



Bart Schaefer wrote:

>On Jun 1,  7:18am, Tim K. (Gmane) wrote:
>}
>} I have a situtation with zsh: I use pine as my mail reader and it has a 
>} feature where it can create a named pipe (FIFO) and write to it when new 
>} mail arrives.
>} 
>} This all seems to work, except when I quit pine, hence terminating the 
>} main "parent" script, the child "notify" script does not exit, it's 
>} stuck reading from the pipe (even though the pipe is deleted).
>
>I think this qualifies as a pine bug.  Removing a named pipe will not
>by itself send an EOF to any processes that are listening on it.  The
>right way for pine to shut down the connection would be to open the fifo,
>remove the disk file, then send a final EOF by closing the descriptor.
>
>Anything else is a race condition with the listening process, which may
>re-open the fifo for reading before pine has removed it.
>
>  
>