I thought that "broken pipe" only happened when writing to a pipe (and my quick review of some documentation supports that)...

But it would make sense that a socket could give you "broken pipe" on read if the connection was broken badly (as opposed to the connection being shut down normally which should just generate "end of file" which sysread will return as 0 and not undef).

So, for example, the connection timing out or the route to the client being lost (to the point of generating "host unreachable" via ICMP), etc. could probably generate this.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")