From owner-freebsd-questions  Mon Mar 16 20:40:42 1998
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Date: Mon, 16 Mar 1998 21:40:43 -0700 (MST)
From: allen campbell <allenc@verinet.com>
Message-Id: <199803170440.VAA12697@const.>
To: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu
Subject: Re: Broken pipe
Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG
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> My guess would have to do with how your pager queues up the output from
> the zcat.  Are you using the same pager in both environments?

Yes.  GNU less.

> The error is harmless, though -- you're reading previously formatted
> manpages, and they're just catted out from the .gz archives in
> /usr/share/man/catX/Y.gz.

The error is harmless and I now think I understand the reason for it.
I found a clue in the bash(1) FAQ;

  23) Why does bash sometimes say `Broken pipe'?

   If a sequence of commands appears in a pipeline, and one
   of the reading commands finishes before the writer has
   finished, the writer receives a SIGPIPE signal.  Many
   other shells special-case SIGPIPE as an exit status in
   the pipeline and do not report it.  For example, in:
   
   ps -aux | head
   
   `head' can finish before `ps' writes all of its output,
   and ps will try to write on a pipe without a reader.  In
   that case, bash will print `Broken pipe' to stderr when
   ps is killed by a SIGPIPE.

This sounds like my observations.  For some reason, my shell (pdksh)
behaves differently when exec'ed by telnetd(1) as opposed to
xterm(1).  I don't know why this difference exists, but it seems
plausible.  Pdksh may be altering its behavior based on the
environment it finds itself in.

Is there a program that displays the state of signals for a given
process?

  Allen Campbell
  allenc@verinet.com

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