I know it's not a direct solution to your problem, but I recently encountered a different approach to a similar problem whereby the...
  1. pipeline was split into its individual commands
  2. each of the commands is echoed to a temporary sh(1) script on the host
  3. the temporary script is then run on the host using ssh(1) & sh(1)

e.g. (escaping as required) 

# ssh $HOST "cat > /tmp/script" << !
rm -f /tmp/files /tmp/contents
sudo find $TARGET_DIR -name \'$TARGET_FILE\' > /tmp/files || exit $?
sudo cat /tmp/files | cpio -oBO /tmp/contents --format ustar" || exit 
+$?
bzip2 -9 -c /tmp/contents || exit $?
exit 0
!
# ssh $HOST "sudo sh /tmp/script"

[download]
... or similar :-D

A user level that continues to overstate my experience :-))

In reply to Re: Detecting failed piped command run via ssh by Bloodnok
in thread Detecting failed piped command run via ssh by devnull

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