Bash, tar, and broken pipe

[Martin Weitzel]

In article <1991May22.192914.22142 at usenet.ins.cwru.edu> chet at po.CWRU.Edu writes:
>The process must exit due to the SIGPIPE, by the way -- no message will be
>printed if it catches the SIGPIPE and calls exit(), unless the fatal signal
>handler is coded like this:
>
>fatal(sig)
>int	sig;
>{
>	cleanup();
>	_exit(128+sig);
	^^^^^^^^^^^^^^  rather: kill(getpid(), sig); ????

>}

Hmm, I know that the shell encodes the information that some program
was terminated by a signal this way in $? - but the other way round
should also be true? On which system and for which shell?

I've just run a quick test, started a child sub-shell from the shell
prompt and terminated that with exit N (for several N close above 128).
I saw no message from the parent shell though the exit status was
transferred correctly according to $?.

(In case it should matter: It ran the test for the Bourne Shell on
ISC's UNIX/386 2.2.)
-- 
Martin Weitzel, email: martin at mwtech.UUCP, voice: 49-(0)6151-6 56 83