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From: sundar@ai.mit.edu (Sundar Narasimhan)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.programmer
Subject: question about non-blocking I/O and SIGPIPE
Message-ID: <14318@life.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 24 Mar 91 22:23:43 GMT
Article-I.D.: life.14318
Sender: news@ai.mit.edu
Reply-To: sundar@ai.mit.edu
Followup-To: comp.unix.programmer
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Lines: 18

Hi: I have a server that is writing data on a socket to a client.
The socket has been marked for non-blocking I/O using the FIONBIO
ioctl. Now, what I need to know is exactly under what conditions
will a SIGPIPE be generated on the server. 

I've read the man pages, but this info is not found anywhere. 
They say that write() will return -1 and errno will be set to
EWOULDBLOCK when the buffers are full. write() can return a 
value less than the bc passed to it, in case the operation would
block, in which case, the manual says the write should be tried
again. (I'm reading this on a Sparc (Sun OS 4.1.1) and my code
is to run on a Pyramid SysV Unix -- which makes it even more 
confusing since FIONBIO works differently under SysV).

I know all this sounds kinda vague but I'll be happy to explain
it in more detail -- you see I have this server that's dying with
SIGPIPE's and I'd like to know how to fix it right (instead of just
patching it).