From: Earnestly <zibeon@gmail.com>
To: dash@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Surprising behaviour when reading from a named pipe and standard input
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2026 01:11:11 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <aYqFr-Twb-njdsDh@teapot> (raw)
I came across this behavioural difference between dash and sh(bash),
bash and zsh.
When attempting to read from a named pipe and stdin at the same time in
a backgrounded process I appear to be losing stdin:
#!/bin/dash --
f() {
mkfifo pipe
cat pipe - <&0 &
echo hello > pipe
rm -f pipe
wait
}
echo hi | f
This outputs (busybox sh likewise):
hello
With sh(bash), bash and zsh I get (and expect):
hello
hi
At first I thought it might be a difference in how dash implements
set -m due to how jobs without it set have their stdin opened as
/dev/null but adding set -m does not appear to help.
Can you help me understand what is happening and why dash differs?
---
I would like to use this technique with age to read identities from a
pipe as the tool doesn't offer another way, read code below:
decrypt() {
# XXX https://github.com/FiloSottile/age/discussions/685
tmpdir=${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/curator-$$
pipe=$tmpdir/s
defer rm -rf -- "$tmpdir"
nofail mkdir -m 0700 -- "$tmpdir"
# XXX Using a pipe limits the size of the identity to around 1MiB on Linux.
# cf. /proc/sys/fs/pipe-max-size
nofail mkfifo -m 0600 -- "$pipe"
# nb. stdin needs to be specified as without job control (set -m) the
# command will have its stdin set to /dev/null.
age -i "$pipe" -d <&0 &
exec 9>"$pipe"
rm -f -- "$pipe"
key_request private >&9
exec 9>&-
wait
}
next reply other threads:[~2026-02-10 1:11 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 3+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2026-02-10 1:11 Earnestly [this message]
2026-02-10 2:00 ` Surprising behaviour when reading from a named pipe and standard input Harald van Dijk
2026-02-10 10:24 ` Earnestly
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