4 ms·

Wouldn't curl return an error and break the pipe? (I haven't tried)

• znep 12y ago
  curl won't buffer the entire stream, since that would be silly, so if it is a big enough response then curl will have already passed parts of it along to the shell through the pipe. Is this likely to cause a catastrophic failure? No. Is it possible? Absolutely.
  • Dylan16807 12y ago
    But if there's no newline or EOF until the pipe breaks...
    • znep 12y ago
      When curl gets the end of the input, it exits and the shell closes the pipe generating an EOF. You get a broken pipe writing to one if the reader goes away, not reading from it. I verified this on OS X with the below "server": $ stty -icanon min 1 time 0 $ nc -v -l 6666 GET / HTTP/1.1 User-Agent: curl/7.34.0 Host: 127.0.0.1:6666 Accept: */* HTTP/1.0 200 ok Content-Length: 1000 echo foo echo bar^C (^C is a control-C). Even with an explicit content-length so curl knows the response was truncated, and without a terminating newline, the shell executes both commands. Again, quite unlikely to be a problem in real life. But it is still a bad habit to feed curl into sh directly.