From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312 Description of problem: Piping the output of an rpm command (for example, -qa) into another program which then breaks the pipe results in all further rpm commands hanging. The only recourse is to kill -9 the hung process. Removing the /var/lib/rpm/__db.00* files restores functionality. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): rpm-4.2-0.69 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. On a working RedHat 9 system: rpm -qa|less , then hit 'q' to exit less. 2. Attempt to run *any* rpm afterwards. Actual Results: RPM hangs Expected Results: RPM should perform the specified action. Additional info:
Created attachment 90821 [details] strace of a normal rpm -e command prior to breakage
Created attachment 90822 [details] strace of the rpm -qa portion of rpm -qa|less
Created attachment 90823 [details] strace of the less portion of the rpm -qa|less
Created attachment 90824 [details] strace of the rpm -e that hangs after rpm -qa|less, up until it gets kill -9'd
Yes, rpm didn't handle SIGPIPE until recently. FIxed (and errata pending) in packages at ftp://ftp.rpm.org/pub/rpm/test-4.2