[cobalt-users] RE: RAQ4r - zcat: stdout: Broken pipe

["Stephanie Sullivan" <ses@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

While I'm not getting a zillion "zcat: stdout: Broken pipe" a day I got 5
instances of it last night on each of 3 servers after installing
RaQ3-All-Security-4.0.2-9648.pkg - (he previous version had been installed).

Clearly, I have this on RAQ3 servers.

The mail message my admin account on each server had 5 instances of the
dreaded zcat: stdout: Broken pipe and was sent at 4:06am - about the time my
daily cron wraps up.

Nothing notable in /var/log/messages or /var/log/cron.

I did a "find / -name *.1.gz -cmin -600" at about 7:00AM and noticed that
the following 5 files were changed in that timeframe:
/usr/man/man1/dig.1.gz
/usr/man/man1/host.1.gz
/usr/man/man1/crontab.1.gz
/usr/man/man1/dnskeygen.1.gz
/usr/man/man1/dnsquery.1.gz

This led me to /etc/cron.daily/makewhatis.cron and that to
/usr/sbin/makewhatis which is a script. A quick "grep zcat
/usr/sbin/makewhatis" found:
              if (use_zcat) {
              if (use_zcat) {
              use_zcat = match(filename,"\\.Z$") ||
              if(use_zcat) {
              if (use_zcat) {
                pipe_cmd = "zcat " filename;

so this may have been the source of zcat: stdout: Broken pipe on my server.

I don't know what to do about it, but perhaps this information might help
someone at cobalt or on this list figure out how to fix this annoyance
and/or prevent similar ones in the future. Especially for people who are
getting this millions of times a day... :-)

	Thanks,
		-Stephanie Sullivan


> Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 13:23:55 -0700
> From: "Curtis Ross" <Curtis_Ross@xxxxxx>
> To: <cobalt-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: [cobalt-users] RAQ4r -  zcat: stdout: Broken pipe
> Reply-To: cobalt-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> Hello All,
>
> Anyone else getting this error emailed to them after installing the
> latest updates (vixie-cron?). Its relates to the cron.weekly but I'm not
> sure what is producing it.
>
> zcat: stdout: Broken pipe
>
> It shows up a zillion (okay maybe only a million) times in the email.