Comment 2 for bug 1207779

Originally, I had:
$ cat /etc/passwd | head -n 1
root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
$ echo ${PIPESTATUS[@]}
0 0

Ie, 'cat' exits success.

That is actually not true. that specific example of 'cat' would never get a broken pipe signal as it would read all of /etc/passwd, write all of /etc/passwd , head would read into buf, split lines, exit.

Better example:
$ cat /dev/zero | head -c 1 ; echo ${PIPESTATUS[@]}
141 0

Note that 141-128=13 and SIGPIPE==13