Useful to know is the exception is printed to stderr, not stdout. So if you continue the pipe after head you still get expected results. cat doesn't die 100% s

Useful to know is the exception is printed to stderr, not stdout. So if you continue the pipe after head you still get expected results. cat doesn't die 100% silently either, check $PIPESTATUS after piping cat into shorter head and you will see its exit code is non zero.