You are absolutely right - can't thank you enough. I checked - sleep is holding on to the pipe that's why read(2) doesn't exit. I can get really dumb at times - how hard was that to figure out :) Also, when the child is a perl script instead of bash/sh, killing it takes away the sleep too. That explains why I saw the issue only with bash/sh. Shouldn't bash/sh do the same, i.e., take care of cleaning up it's child processes??? Maybe this is not the right forum for bash/sh but what's the harm in asking :)

In reply to Re^2: parent process stuck in read(2) on pipe opened to child process using backtick by Anonymous Monk
in thread parent process stuck in read(2) on pipe opened to child process using backtick by Anonymous Monk

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