Suggestion: bash variable to suppress "Broken pipe" messages

[John Van Essen]

Inasmuch as bash is correctly reporting SIGPIPEs, there are many
situations where that message is more bothersome than helpful.

In the case of a pipeline, it's even more of a bother, as bash 
reports the status of all commands in the pipeline in addition
to the one that aborted with the broken pipe.

And worse yet, if a command in the pipeline has large arguments,
like a parameter-line source to awk or perl, then bash spews out
the entire command, and I have to scroll way back up the screen to
see the output that I was interested in.  rcs2log is a fine example.

This happens most frequently when piping to more or less or head.

Can you please implement a bash variable, such as DONT_REPORT_SIGPIPE,
that can be set in a script or upon interactive shell startup, that
will suppress those messages?

I realize there's a compile-time workaround for this using the above
as a definition, but that's not practical for most users and doesn't
allow per-shell flexibility.

Thank you for considering this.

Yours,
-- 
        John Van Essen  Univ of MN Alumnus  <vanes002@umn.edu>
        3DGamers  Systems Software Support  <jve@3dgamers.com>