bug#54062: 29.0.50; [PATCH] Eshell should inform processes when a pipe is broken

[Jim Porter]

Consider the following shell command:

  yes | sh -c 'read NAME'

Ordinarily, you'd expect that `sh' reads a single "y", exits, and then 
the next time `yes' tries to write, it finds that the pipe was broken. 
However, that's not what happens in Eshell. Running the above and then 
calling `M-x list-processes' will show that `yes' is still running.

Attached is a patch (with a test) to fix this by telling Eshell to 
signal SIGPIPE at the appropriate time. I've also attached a couple 
small patches to clean up a few tiny issues in Eshell; if it would be 
better to split those out into a different bug, just let me know. I 
thought it might be simpler to attach them here rather than one bug for 
each.

(Note: for the test to pass, you might need to remove the .elc files 
before running the tests. Since the patch updates 
test/lisp/eshell/eshell-tests-helpers.el and there's not an easy way to 
force that to recompile before running the actual tests, it can fail in 
some cases.)

As an aside: of course, this is a somewhat contrived example. The real 
reason I care about this is to support Lisp functions in Eshell 
pipelines, so that you can run something like `git log | less', where 
`less' is a Lisp function that opens a View mode buffer. When closing 
that buffer, it would be nice to kill the `git log' process, since it 
can go on for quite a while in a big repository. My patch series for 
that feature is getting pretty unwieldy though (14 patches and 
counting), so I peeled this off to merge separately.

0001-lisp-eshell-esh-io.el-grep-null-device-Remove-unused.patch
Description: Text document

0002-Improve-docstrings-for-eshell-exec-lisp-and-function.patch
Description: Text document

0003-Ensure-eshell-output-object-always-returns-nil-for-c.patch
Description: Text document

0004-Send-SIGPIPE-to-external-Eshell-processes-if-their-o.patch
Description: Text document