Re: the zen of SIGPIPE

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>>> I think that it would be more useful for xargs to raise(2) certain
>>> signals which terminated its child rather than write to stderr.
>> Um.  Wow.  I hadn't thought of that, but it superficially makes a
>> whole lot of sense.  I want to think about it a bit.

>> Of course, figuring out exactly which signals should get this
>> treatment is likely to be a bikeshed.  SIGPIPE, yes, but beyond
>> that?  I'm not sure.

> As for signals, well, it probably makes sense to also propagate
> SIGINT this way.

I'm not so sure.

If SIGINT is tty-generated, it will hit the whole process group
already.  If that hits xargs, there's no need to push it up; if it
doesn't, there's probably a reason and it arguably shouldn't.

Similar remarks apply to other tty-generated signals.

Non-tty-generated instances of signals which are normally
tty-generated, like SIGINT...I'm not sure.  I'm tempted to say that
they're rare enough there's no point in taking any particular measures
for them.

SIGSTOP, I'm inclined to agree.

I do think there should be flags to control all this.

> [...] may be quite important for allowing interactive use to proceed
> the way that you expect.

I'm not even sure what "the way that [I] expect" is, much less how
similar it is to the way you expect....

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