Error in perlipc documentation?

I'm trying to puzzle through something I see in the perlipc documentation. If you're writing to a pipe, you should also trap SIGPIPE. Otherwise, think of what happens when you start up a pipe to a command that doesn't exist: the open() will in all likelihood succeed (it only reflects the fork()'s success), but then your output will fail--spectacularly. Perl can't know whether the command worked because your command is actually running in a separate process whose exec() might have failed. Therefore, while readers of bogus commands return just a quick end of file, writers to bogus command will trigger a signal they'd better be prepared to handle. Consider: ``` open(FH, "|bogus") or die "can't fork: $!"; print FH "bang\n" or die "can't write: $!"; close FH or die "can't close: $!"; ``` That won't blow up until the close, and it will blow up with a SIGPIPE. To catch it, you could use this: ``` $SIG{PIPE} = 'IGNORE'; open(FH, "|bogus") or die "can't fork: $!"; print FH "bang\n" or die "can't write: $!"; close FH or die "can't close: status=$?"; ``` If I'm reading that correctly, it says that the first version will probably not die until the final close. However, that's not happening on my OS X box (Perl versions 5.8.9 through 5.15.9). It blows up on the `open` with a "can't fork: No such file or directory" regardless of whether or not I have the $SIG{PIPE} line in there. What am I misunderstanding?