Broken pipe

[Fairlight]

On Mon, Mar 06, 2006 at 01:31:12PM -0600, after drawing runes in goat's blood,
Richard D. Williams cast forth these immortal, mystical words:
> What causes a broken pipe?
> 
> I have a printing process that re-directs to any one of 22 offices.  
> This one process booms out with a "Broken Pipe" error.  I don't think I 
> am doing anything different on this table that I have done on other 
> tables that work just fine.

I agree with Jeff that you're not giving much information to go on.
However, I'll answer your question directly:

In general, what generates SIGPIPE (Broken Pipe) is either writing to
or reading from the file descriptors of another process, a named pipe, or
socket, and having that process, named pipe, or socket disappear before an
attempt at another I/O operation is attempted.  The "pipe" is no longer
present, and the signal is generated because there's in effect nothing left
to talk to--nothing is holding the other end of the line, so to speak.

You'd get this potentially if you were doing something like piping output
to another program and the program was killed or otherwise terminated
before all I/O was complete, and I've also seen this (specifically with
centericq...the most recent network program I've seen this with) happen
when a network connection just goes "byebye" without proper error handling
and checking being done before the next read or write with that connection.

If you're not killing the process on the other end, it's quite possibly
crashing or even just exiting properly when it thinks it should--but
before your process is done communicating with it.

That's what generally causes it.  That said, what in specific are you
having issues with and/or doing with which we might help you?

mark->