Broken pipe

henkelarsson12 · 04-05-2006, 10:24 PM

EDIT: oops, don't know waht I was thinking, meant title of this to be broken pipe, dont know why i put link

Hi, I just recently starting getting this error message anytime i update ports through #portsnap fetch update and sometimes when I compiling something through ports:
(#portsnap fetch update has always worked for me fine, and it still appears to work and updates ports but I see this error, I run FreeBSD-6.0 w/ the 6.1 prerelease kernel, I do not know if that may have to do w/ anything, I rebuilt world like one week ago, but I am not sure if the error started showing up right afterwards or just lately )

Code:

OLIVIER# portsnap fetch update
Looking up portsnap.FreeBSD.org mirrors... using portsnap2.FreeBSD.org
Fetching snapshot tag... done.
Fetching snapshot metadata... done.
Updating from Wed Apr  5 16:46:59 EDT 2006 to Wed Apr  5 21:26:10 EDT 2006.
Fetching 4 metadata patches... done.
Applying metadata patches... done.
Fetching 0 metadata files... done.
Fetching 63 patches.....10....20....30....40....50....60. done.
Applying patches... done.
Fetching 1 new ports or files... done.
sort: write failed: standard output: Broken pipe
sort: write error
Removing old files and directories... done.
Extracting new files:
/usr/ports/[ a ton of ports here, removed them since its a long list and I did not think it was important]
Building new INDEX files... done.
OLIVIER#

Has anyone had any similar problem or know what might be causing it?
Thanks in advance.

HLarsson

taylor_venable · 04-08-2006, 11:12 AM

I'm not sure what is happening in this specific case (not familiar with portsnap; I use cvsup myself), but this may help:

Say you've got two processes A and B connected with a pipe like A===B. If I remember correctly, a pipe is actually implemented in the OS as a separate construct for connecting two byte streams. The pipe is only gone (leaves the OS) when both A and B close their connections. So if A closes its end, B still has access to the pipe. Suppose this happens, and B tries to write to (or read from) the pipe; there's nothing on the other end, so the OS has to send B a SIGPIPE to let it know that A isn't accessible anymore.