Thanks for this, but that's what i've got atm. I've installed my routine for $SIG(INT) and inside i close the pipe explicitly, however, this does not help and the behaviour is the same: after the script terminates, doing echo "message" > pipename or trying to write with any other program results in "Text file busy". Under normal circumstances a writing program should just block (unless the pipe is open in non-blocking mode), given that there are no readers (the script has been terminated). Any ideas? Thanks.