Child died with signal 13

[Randall R Schulz]

Eugene,

Signal numbers and errno codes (and process status codes) are distinct. 
Process status codes to incorporate the signal number when a signal caused 
the death of the process.

Signal 13 is SIGPIPE: Write to a pipe with no process there to read the 
data. In your context, this means the tar process has closed the pipe 
because it has concluded there is no more data to be retrieved from the 
gunzip sub-process it started in response to the 'z' option. If tar didn't 
do this, it would have to read all the gunzip-ed data. If it didn't either 
close the pipe (leading to the signal) or read the data, the child would 
just block and those processes would stall (at least until you or some 
other external action killed the tar + gunzip process group).

Signal 2 is SIGINT, the signal that results when you type a ^C.

Interactive shells suppress messages about certain signals causing process 
termination. In particular, SIGPIPE and SIGINT terminations are not 
reported as such by BASH. Tar is not making these exceptions.


Randall Schulz
Mountain View, CA USA


At 05:51 2002-02-26, Eugene Rosenzweig wrote:
>Hmm, it worked for me. I assume out of the documentation that tar will 
>spawn gzip -d filename and pipe it into itself. So, if 13 is the system 
>error from tar, which is EACCES, permission denied so maybe there is a 
>problem accessing the file? The listing shows that file is owned by 
>Administ(rator?) and prompt says Administrator so it seems correct but if 
>you substitute filename for nonexistent one then you get tar: Child died 
>with signal 2 <-- 2 being 'file not found' error so it seems that there is 
>a problem with permissions?
>
>Eugene.


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