Interesting - I was sort of suspecting that because the most common suspect for error (non-existent reader) would cause a SIGPIPE and you'd get different symptoms. I uploaded this code to a Linux box so I could play with it. Your code works fine on that machine verbatim. I haven't been able to come up with a scenario to force this close() error to happen. Sorry - I'm stumped. Maybe your system admin can shed some light on this?