Question

I am calling find from a perl script like this:

    my $one_file = `find $search_dir -name "\*.$refinfilebase.search" -print | head -n 1`;

If I execute it from the shell, I get no error. Also, it returns the right value to $one_file, but I get this on the prompt:

find: write error: Broken pipe

Why would that be? How can I get rid of this find: write error: Broken pipe message?

Answer 1

You could try this (although I did not manage to reproduce your error message using the code you posted, so perhaps this error-free version of mine might give you an error message as well…):

my $file = `find $search_dir -name "\*.ssf" -print -exec head -n 1 {} \\;`;

Here’s some sample output I got from a test run:

./tmp1.ssf
HEADER    PROTEIN                                 21-FEB-11     1PDB

HTH