Broken Pipe Error

ken734 · 09-04-2003, 06:26 AM

Could someone explain what a "Broken Pipe" error is?

XavierP · 09-04-2003, 06:34 AM

Well, I did a quick search on www.google.com/linux and found on the second page (at the top) that a broken pipe means that one process finished before another. For example, tar aborts before bzip finishes.

To quote the page I saw,

Quote:

"There should have been another message before the broken pipe. Are you low on memory by any chance? Are your tar files more than 2GB? Those are the only things that come to mind."

Can you give more details of your problem, or this just a query?

shermang · 09-04-2003, 06:36 AM

weird, I've had 'broken pipe' errors when DCCing in x-chat

ken734 · 09-04-2003, 07:11 AM

Thanks for your reply XavierP.

I was at someone elses computer when I got that error, but interesting is your example since in fact it was in a small script that was using tar with compression (tar -cvzf). The script accepted command line input for the directory to backup and the destination directory. The script worked, for the most part, but in one directory to backup I recieved the broken pipe error.

XavierP · 09-04-2003, 07:49 AM

Could there be some corruption in the directory? That's the only reason I can think of for one directory not to work....

ken734 · 09-04-2003, 07:57 AM

I think you must be right about the corruption. I can't test it now since I am not at that particular computer.

What would be the best way to try to rectify the problem? Running fsck?

Thanks again.

XavierP · 09-04-2003, 09:54 AM

FSCK may help - I'm not overly sure.........man fsck will give you a list of options and switches. It seems you can scan a particular type of file!! Better than scandisk that's for sure.