On 09/05/2026 23:45, Collin Funk wrote:
Not 100% sure if this is a bug fix or an improvement. I wrote the NEWS
entry as a bug fix because the behavior seems unintentional and I am
leaning towards that.

'shred' does not work on FIFOs since the data is never written to
disk; their directory entry just serves as a means to access the pipe.
With that in mind, the current behavior seems poor, in my opinion:

     $ timeout --verbose 10 shred fifo
     timeout: sending signal TERM to command ‘shred’

However, if you open a reader:

     $ cat fifo > /dev/null &
     [1] 1032724
     $ shred fifo
     shred: fifo: invalid file type
     [1]+  Done                       cat fifo > /dev/null

This patch changes the behavior to open with O_NONBLOCK, similar to
what is done in 'sync':

     $ ./src/shred fifo
     shred: fifo: invalid file type
LGTM.

cheers,
Padraig

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