Penguin
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Signal: Pipe

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.

You might see this message if you have a series of commands in a shell pipe line and one of the processes quits. Eg
$ cat somefile | head

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.