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, no

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.