Recently, while porting a shell script from Linux to Cygwin, I encountered an error due to Cygwin pipe problem. The error was produced while executing the following command line:
$ cat a.file b.file | head -c 1M > c.file
And the error said:
cat: write error: No space left on device
According to the error message, I checked the file size of a.file and b.file:
$ ls -l a.file b.file
-rwx------+ 1 yestyle mkpasswd 841920 May 5 16:39 a.file
-rwx------+ 1 yestyle mkpasswd 7340032 May 4 11:16 b.file
And the disk usage information:
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
D:/cygwin/bin 60G 49G 12G 82% /usr/bin
D:/cygwin/lib 60G 49G 12G 82% /usr/lib
D:/cygwin 60G 49G 12G 82% /
C: 30G 28G 1.6G 95% /cygdrive/c
D: 60G 49G 12G 82% /cygdrive/d
E: 61G 44G 17G 74% /cygdrive/e
As you can see, the available space of disk is fairly enough for the concatenated size of a.file and b.file, which is about 7.8MB.
So the limitation of pipe buffer size became suspicious, and I modified the command line as following (using a temporary file instead of pipe):
$ cat a.file b.file > tmp.file
head -c 1M tmp.file > c.file
And it worked! I couldn’t find the accurate pipe buffer size of Cygwin (and the reference source) after Googling for a while, but it just worked.
PS: My environment information:
- Cygwin: 1.7.18(0.263/5/3)
- Windows: XP version 5.1 (2600.xpsp_sp3_qfe.130704-0421: Service Pack 3)