git clone silently aborts if stdout gets a broken pipe

One of our Perl scripts that does a git clone suddenly started to fail when I upgraded to git 1.8.4 from 1.8.3.1.

The failing Perl code used a construct like this:

	Git::command_oneline('clone', $url, $path);

There is no error raised, but the directory specified by $path is not created. If I look at the process using strace I can see the clone taking place, but then it seems to get a broken pipe since the code above only cares about the first line from stdout (and with the addition of "Checking connectivity..." git clone now outputs two lines to stdout).

If I change the code to:

	my @foo = Git::command('clone', $url, $path);

it works as expected.

I have attached a simple Perl script that shows the problem. Run it as "clone_test.pl <git url>". With git 1.8.4 it will fail for the first two test cases, whereas with older git versions it succeeds for all four test cases.

I hope this is enough information for someone to look into this regression.

Best regards, //Peter