How to solve "Broken Pipe" error when using awk with head

Posted by Jon on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Jon
Published on 2011-11-28T15:23:41Z Indexed on 2011/11/28 18:10 UTC
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linux

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pipe

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awk

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head

I'm getting broken pipe errors from a command that does something like:

ls -tr1 /a/path | awk -F '\n' -vpath=/prepend/path/ '{print path$1}' | head -n 50

Essentially I want to list (with absolute path) the oldest X files in a directory.

What seems to happen is that the output is correct (I get 50 file paths output) but that when head has output the 50 files it closes stdin causing awk to throw a broken pipe error as it is still outputting more rows.

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