Re: Strange behaviour on 'read' from a pipe

[Chet Ramey]

On 3/31/12 9:19 AM, Lluís Batlle i Rossell wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have this script, that I've found to never write "DONE" in my systems, with
> bash 4.0, 4.1, 4.2.. until 4.2-p20, my last test.
> 
> However, in irc some people told me it prints DONE for them. If I run the 
> script with
> bash under 'strace -f', it also prints DONE.

It looks like a simple race condition.  I suspect that the scheduler
arranges things so that the child process ends up exiting between the
open and the read, but I don't have any real evidence to back it up.
(Like you, my Mac OS X system prints `DONE'.)

You might want to try using exec to open the FIFO in the parent process
rather than trying to open it on each read.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/