There was actually a project for the GNU Coreutils to make sure that write errors were being reported[1]. It looks like echo is using the "atexit (close_stdout)

There was actually a project for the GNU Coreutils to make sure that write errors were being reported[1]. It looks like echo is using the "atexit (close_stdout);" method described in that talk to close the stream and detect errors. You can see what close_stdout actually does here: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/tree/lib/closeout.c http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/tree/lib/closeou... Arguably GNU echo is the only one to actually get this correct. Which is kinda amusing given how the comments on github are all about how ugly and bloated it is and how elegant the Plan9 and UnixV ones are. The talk is worth a watch if you care about these things. It kind of re-enforces your point about read/write being to complicated to use correctly. Meyering found these kinds of bugs in lots of other programs like perl, python, rsync and emacs. [1] http://www.irill.org/events/ghm-gnu-hackers-meeting/videos/jim-meyering-goodbye-world-the-perils-of-relying-on-output-streams-in-c http://www.irill.org/events/ghm-gnu-hackers-meeting/videos/j... (slides: http://www.gnu.org/ghm/2011/paris/slides/jim-meyering-goodbye-world.pdf http://www.gnu.org/ghm/2011/paris/slides/jim-meyering-goodby... )