On Feb 18 22:08, Lasse Collin wrote:
(Please Cc me when replying, I'm not subscribed to the list.)
Hi!
I suspect that there is a bug in Cygwin:
1. Create a pipe with both ends in blocking mode (O_NONBLOCK
is not set).
2. The writer sets its end to non-blocking mode.
3. The writer writes to the pipe.
4. The writer restores its end of the pipe to blocking mode
before the reader has read anything from the pipe.
5. The writer closes its end of the pipe.
6. The reader reads from the pipe in blocking mode. The last
bytes written by the writer never appear at the reader,
thus data is silently lost.
Omitting the step 4 above makes the problem go away.
I can imagine. A few years back, when changing the pipe code to
using overlapped IO, we stumbled over a problem in Windows. When
closing an overlapped pipe while I/O is still ongoing, Windows
simply destroys the pipe buffers without flushing the data to the
reader. This is not much of a problem for blocking IO, but it
obviously is for non-blocking.
The workaround for this behaviour is this: If the pipe is closed, and
this is the writing side of a nonblocking pipe, a background thread gets
started which keeps the overlapped structure open and continues to wait
for IO completion (i.e. the data has been sent to the reader).
However, if you switch back to blocking before closing the pipe, the
aforementioned mechanism does not kick in.