needinfo canceled: [Bug 690209] unexpected "od: write error" when running od on a large file and redirecting to "head"

[bugzilla at redhat.com]

Product: Fedora
Version: 13
Component: coreutils

kloedej at knmi.nl has canceled Bug Zapper <triage at lists.fedoraproject.org>'s
request for needinfo:
Bug 690209: unexpected "od: write error" when running od on a large file and
redirecting to "head"
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=690209

------- Additional Comments from kloedej at knmi.nl
Yes, this problem still occurs on my system. However, I did find out that there
is a relation to which shell you are using: it only occurs when I use csh as
interactive shell, not if I am using bash, so it might also be a csh problem.

Currently I have these versions installed:

>rpm -qf /usr/bin/od
coreutils-8.5-7.fc14.i686
>rpm -qf /bin/csh
tcsh-6.17-12.fc14.i686
>rpm -qf /bin/bash
bash-4.1.7-3.fc14.i686

This is the output I see on the terminal:

(running the bash as interactive shell)
>csh -c 'od -t x1 -A n /boot/vmlinuz* | head -n 10000 > temp.hexdump.csh' 
>
>od -t x1 -A n /boot/vmlinuz* | head -n 10000 > temp.hexdump.csh
>

result: no errors and identical outputs

(running csh as interactive shell)
>od -t x1 -A n /boot/vmlinuz* | head -n 10000 > temp.hexdump.csh
od: write error
od: write error
>bash -c 'od -t x1 -A n /boot/vmlinuz* | head -n 10000 > temp.hexdump.bash'
od: write error
od: write error
>
result: both cases give the write error. Output is identical to the above case
without errors for both cases.

Also when using csh as interactive shell, the command clearly takes much longer
to run, i.e. bash seems to communciate to the od command when the head command
is done procuding output and stops the od command (or moves it to the
background?), but csh does not (I guess).

As requested, I'll attach the strace output for the problematic command:

strace -o strace.output od -t x1 -A n /boot/vmlinuz* | head -n 10000 >
temp.hexdump.csh