EC
Errno::EPIPE
RubyWARNINGCriticalIO

Broken pipe — reader has closed

Quick Answer

Rescue Errno::EPIPE around writes to pipes and sockets; exit gracefully when the reader is gone.

What this means

Raised when a process tries to write to a pipe or socket whose reading end has been closed. Common when piping Ruby output to tools like head or less that close stdin before all data is consumed. Maps to POSIX errno 32.

Why it happens
  1. 1Writing to $stdout when piped output is closed early (e.g., ruby script.rb | head -5)
  2. 2Writing to a socket after the remote end has closed the connection

Fix

Rescue EPIPE in output loops

Rescue EPIPE in output loops
begin
  items.each { |item| puts item }
rescue Errno::EPIPE
  exit 0   # reader is done — exit cleanly
end

Why this works

Rescuing EPIPE and exiting with 0 mirrors the behaviour of standard Unix utilities like cat.

Code examples
Common occurrence with headruby
# ruby generate_lines.rb | head -1
# Errno::EPIPE on the 2nd write after head closes stdin
Suppress EPIPE for CLI toolsruby
Signal.trap('PIPE', 'SIG_DFL')   # let OS handle SIGPIPE silently
Rescue in socket writeruby
begin
  socket.write(data)
rescue Errno::EPIPE
  socket.close
end
Sources
Official documentation ↗

Ruby Core Documentation

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