Broken pipe problem? If so, why?

From: malgosia askanas (ma_at_panix.com)
Date: 03/28/05 

Date: 28 Mar 2005 10:11:39 -0500

I have a mail-handling program written in Perl. It gets passed a mail message,
reads the header, does some processing, and exits. The code for reading
the header is:

  $/ = ''; # paragraph mode
  $header = <>;

I am invoking this program in a pipe from procmail. For some messages (I
believe, for very large ones) I get the message "Error while writing to
<progname>" in the procmail log. I would be inclined to believe that it's
a broken pipe problem, but if so, why does its occurrence depend on the
message size? The program reads only the header for _all_ messages,
independent of size - yet in a vast majority of cases, procmail does not
complain. Can you advise?

Many thanks in advance,
-malgosia

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