seq 1000000000 | gzip | zcat | head

##</code><code>##

$ time ( seq 1000000000 | gzip | zcat | head )
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real    0m0.051s
user    0m0.056s
sys     0m0.005s

##</code><code>##

$ seq 1000000000 | gzip | perl -e'$SIG{ PIPE } = "IGNORE"; exec("zcat")' | head
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gzip: stdout: Broken pipe