writefd_unbuffered failed - Broken pipe on local rsync

[Matt McCutchen]

On Wed, 2010-03-10 at 11:58 +0000, Dave Howorth wrote:
> I'm seeing an error that says there is a broken pipe, but the rsync
> command is local to one machine:
> 
> /usr/bin/rsync -rltH --stats -D --delete --numeric-ids --whole-file
> /data/dir /backup/suse1/suse1-data-dir/ >/tmp/rsync-out 2>&1
> 
> The complete contents of the rsync-out file are:
> 
> rsync: writefd_unbuffered failed to write 88 bytes [receiver]: Broken
> pipe (32)
> rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(1122)
> [receiver=2.6.9]
> 
> 
> Q3 on http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/issues.html implies that the error
> message necessarily involves a remote rsync. Does anybody know what the
> message means for a local transfer, please?

More precisely, Q3 should refer to the rsync server process, which is
simply forked by the client for a local transfer.

It's weird that rsync fails like that with no additional output.  Try a
newer rsync version, or increase the verbosity to -vv to get some more
information.

-- 
Matt