diff panics (broken-pipe unwrap) when its stdout is closed early
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Assessment
- Difficulty
- 3/5
- Estimated time
- 1-2 days
- Newbie friendliness
- 72/100
Research direction
Start with the output writes identified in src/diff.rs:94 and src/side_diff.rs:353-356, then reproduce both normal and side-by-side cases using the provided seq, sed, and head commands. Verify that closed-pipe output no longer panics or prints an error, and that both modes terminate with the expected SIGPIPE status like GNU diff.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
Summary
When diff's standard output is a pipe whose reader closes early (e.g. diff … | head), uutils diff aborts with a panic (exit 134, core dump)
instead of dying cleanly to SIGPIPE like GNU (exit 141). The output is written with a bare .unwrap() on the write_all/push_output result; the BrokenPipe error is unwrapped and, under panic="abort", aborts the process. This affects every output mode: the normal/context/unified/ed path writes the buffered result in src/diff.rs:94, and the side-by-side (-y) path writes each line in src/side_diff.rs:353-356.
Steps to reproduce
$ seq 1 100000 > b1; seq 1 100000 | sed 's/5/X/' > b2
$ diffutils diff b1 b2 | head -1
thread 'main' panicked at src/diff.rs:94:41:
called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: Os { code: 32, kind: BrokenPipe, message: "Broken pipe" }
$ echo "${PIPESTATUS[0]}"
134
Side-by-side mode hits the sibling site src/side_diff.rs:353:
$ diffutils diff -y b1 b2 | head -1
thread 'main' panicked at src/side_diff.rs:353:87:
called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: Os { code: 32, kind: BrokenPipe, message: "Broken pipe" }
$ echo "${PIPESTATUS[0]}"
134
Expected behavior
Match GNU: a closed output pipe terminates the program via SIGPIPE (exit 141) with no error message and no core dump.
$ /usr/bin/diff b1 b2 | head -1
1c1
$ echo "${PIPESTATUS[0]}"
141
$ /usr/bin/diff -y b1 b2 | head -1
1 < 1
$ echo "${PIPESTATUS[0]}"
141
Root cause
The full diff output (normal/context/unified/ed) is buffered and written once:
// src/diff.rs:94
io::stdout().write_all(&result).unwrap();
Side-by-side writes each line straight to the locked stdout and unwraps every
write:
// src/side_diff.rs:353-356
push_output(...).unwrap(); // and the sibling unwraps at :354, :356
Any write_all/push_output error — BrokenPipe in the common pipe-closed case — is unwrapped and aborts.
Found by our static analysis tooling.
- Dominant language
- Rust
- Stars
- 276
- Forks
- 39
- Avg merge
- 3h 27m
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 3
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
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- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
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