In the unix pipeline model, components read input, perform some transformation, and print output. There is no need to do any clean-up. As nneonneo explained, be

In the unix pipeline model, components read input, perform some transformation, and print output. There is no need to do any clean-up. As nneonneo explained, because they rely on SIGPIPE, most unix programs don't even need to check for errors from write(2). Naturally, in the rare case you want to do some clean-up you can: $ perl -E '$SIG{PIPE} = sub { die "cleanup" }; say "y" while 1' | head -1 y cleanup at -e line 1.