This signal is raised when a program writes to a socket or fifo that has no readers. The default action of this signal is to cause the program to terminate.
After "head" has printed out the first 10 lines and quits, "cat" will get a pipe error. However, cat catches the signal and quits gracefully. If you use cvs, then you might see the shell print out a message as cvs doesn't handle this signal gracefully.
9 pages link to SIGPIPE: