`tail` does not exit when pipe is broken

[theofficialgman]

gnu coreutils tail implementation exits if the output of tail is piped to another command and that other command exits.
coreutils tail -f file | filter

this functionality was added in coreutils 8.28 and a few bugs relating to it were fixed in 8.31.

uutils/coreutils tail does not exit when the piped command exits

[fritzrehde]

Hi, do you have a concrete command where the uutils tail does not exit? I tried

coreutils tail -f file.txt | head -n 2

and tail exited normally after printing two lines. But maybe this is not the situation you mean.

[cakebaker]

Closed by mistake, re-opening issue.

[ChrisDryden]

AFAIK this is because the rust runtime suppresses the pipeline signal handlers. By using this implementation of the pipeline signal handler: #9657 and this in the tail utility:

Using:
#[cfg(unix)]
uucore::init_sigpipe_capture!();

#[cfg(unix)]
if !signals::sigpipe_was_ignored() {
    let _ = signals::enable_pipe_errors();
}

This can be fixed. I did some testing to see how that would impact the GNU tests for this and it appears to be able to address all of the pipeline signal related tests: #9646

[ChrisDryden]

Theres also another bug related to the FIFO tail handler not exiting when the underlying process exits which is addressed by this but is seperate than the above issue: #9663