Re: EPIPE in standard utils ([issue41])

[Richard Stallman]

    In my opinion, it is incorrect for a shell utility (such as sed or any
    of the textutils) to respond to EPIPE for stdout (and, arguably, any
    other output file) by

            1) printing a message on stderr
            2) exiting with non-0 status

It would be quite a nuisance to do anything else,
so the question is, is there sufficient reason to bother?
What harm results if the program does this?