Re: gzip -q && SIGPIPE

[Paul Eggert]

Joshua Kronengold <address@hidden> writes:

> It's arguable that the cat behavior is bad and wrong as well, really -- 

Perhaps, but the current 'cat' behavior is required by POSIX and has
been in place for decades, so I doubt whether people would want to
change it now.

> Why should IGNORE + "ignore" = complain?

When you ignore SIGPIPE, you're not asking to ignore pipe errors;
you're asking to be notified of them in a different way (via write
failure that acts like an I/O error, rather than via a signal).

 gzip -q does not ignore all errors, just "unimportant" ones.  It is a
judgment call whether errno==EPIPE is an "unimportant" error.  I tend
to agree with you that it might be better to ignore such errors with
-q, but it's not exactly a bug in the current system, more an infelicity.