Thank you very much for your reply! I had a chance to test on Windows earlier today, and also just tested all your examples as well, Windows and Linux. It really does seem that <> doesn't appear to be interruptible by signal handlers there, even if I forcibly close STDIN (this works to abort <> on Linux). pedrete said in the root node "Linux Debian", which is why I had left Windows out of my considerations (and didn't even test there initially) and only talked about Linux.