CODEWITHSUNDEEP
perlunixscriptingfind
719016
719016

Reputation: 10451

calling find with backticks from perl - find: write error: Broken pipe

I am calling find from a perl script like this:

    my $one_file = `find $search_dir -name "\*.$refinfilebase.search" -print | head -n 1`;

If I execute it from the shell, I get no error. Also, it returns the right value to $one_file, but I get this on the prompt:

find: write error: Broken pipe

Why would that be? How can I get rid of this find: write error: Broken pipe message?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 3056

Answers (3)

TLP
TLP

Reputation: 67910

Why are you using find and head in backticks, when there are perl ways to handle it? I.e.:

I would only recommend using backticks when you're absolutely sure about what you are doing, and it seems to me that you are not. Heck, you could make your current attempt work by simply doing this:

my @files = `find $search_dir -name "\*.$refinfilebase.search" -print`
my $one_file = $files[0];

Upvotes: 3

canavanin
canavanin

Reputation: 2719

You could try this (although I did not manage to reproduce your error message using the code you posted, so perhaps this error-free version of mine might give you an error message as well...):

my $file = `find $search_dir -name "\*.ssf" -print -exec head -n 1 {} \\;`;

Here's some sample output I got from a test run:

./tmp1.ssf
HEADER    PROTEIN                                 21-FEB-11     1PDB

HTH

Upvotes: 1

unpythonic
unpythonic

Reputation: 4070

This "error" is perfectly normal and is to be expected.

  • You're running a find command which prints out (potentially) many lines of output.
  • You're feeding that into head which quits after getting one line of input.
  • The find command tries to write its remaining lines to a pipe that has no one listening anymore (head is dead).
  • find will throw an error.

If you want to get rid of the error just do:

my $file = `find .... 2>/dev/null | head -n 1`;

This will keep the utterly predictable error from find from getting to your terminal (since neither the backticks nor the pipe into head touch stderr, which is where that error is being printed).

Upvotes: 4

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