[...]
> Your little script, however, does NOT result in this error (talking
> about 2.1.49). But there definitely is something wrong. What really
> strikes me that both constructs don't fiddle with file descriptors
> located on a NFS file system, only with pipes between processes. That
> -ESTALE error _should_ be impossible.
Here documents are placed in a file in $TMPDIR by the shell. They do
not use pipes in any shell I know of.
Ralf