[ILUG] Piping to multiple processes (which might die)?

[Ronan Cunniffe]

Quoting Brian Foster <blf at utvinternet.ie>:
>   | I did the following:
>   | 
>  1|   $ mkfifo f1
>  2|   $ lav2yuv capture.avi | yuvdenoise | tee f1 | mpeg2enc blah blah &
>  3|   $ cat f1 | mpeg2enc different blah blah
>   | 
>   | And hey! It works!  Until somebody dies!  Yippe... oh.  [ ... ]
> 
>  ( a winner of the Useless Use of cat(1) Award:  you don't need
>   the `cat f1 |' in the 3rd line, a simple `<f1' will suffice. )
Grrr... I've had that bad habit since MS-DOS 3.2

>  upshot is a POSIX.2 `tee' would probably spit out an error
>  message if one of the `mpeg2enc's dies, but the remaining
>  one would continue to be fed data and hence run until it
>  either completes or dies for reasons of its own.  which is
>  exactly what you want!   so what is happening??

<contrition>
  Oops.
</contrition>

Um, my test was to tee to a fifo I didn't read from... resulting in the other
reader hanging around forever.... not realising that never-opened-for-reading
and opened-and-later-closed might be different.  Sensible behaviour has now been
observed.
 
>  incidently, if your shell and system both support process
>  redirection, you could do the above as a one-liner.  syntax
>  varies depending on the shell, but in bash(1) and ksh(1):
> 
>      lav2yuv capture.avi | yuvdenoise | \
>          tee >(mpeg2enc different blah blah) | mpeg2enc blah blah
mpeg2enc generates stats during the run, so I give each one an xterm.

Thanks,
Ronan