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
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
rust
Domain
cli

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)
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