When a program that is part of a pipeline quits, it closes its stdin andstdout. Programs that produce the input for the quitted process may still tryto write to its stdin. Since they cannot, they will receive a SIGPIPE from thekernel. You can see this in action: $ seq 110000| head -11$echo"${PIPESTATUS[@]}"141 0 Conventionally, an exit status N greater than 128 indicates the programwas terminated by signal N - 128. Since SIGPIPE is signal 13, 141 - 128 = 13 indicates your program was ended by...
