Re: How to misplace an entire pipeline

[Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com>]

On Fri, 05 Aug 2011 20:31:09 -0700
Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com> wrote:
> Suspend a pipeline whose tail is a builtin that has already exited, and
> the whole job gets lost, orphaning the left hand side:

This sounds like the extra-special code that takes account of the fact
that the right hand side of a pipline is run in the current job but
allows you by weird tricks to treat it as a separate job anyway.  The
suspension is supposed to cause a fork, so you forfeit the ability to
have the result within the current shell in return for being able to put
the job into the background.  What it's supposed to do if the part
executing in the current shell is already finished I have no idea;
presumably then it has no need to fork, though whether there's a special
case for the special case is another question.  This is code I don't go
near; I'm not even convinced in this case that Sven ever completely
understood it and I remember trying it years ago and being puzzled by
the results.  Search for the quotation from the Nibelungenlied.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com>
Web page now at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/p.w.stephenson/