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You can't rely on SIGPIPE to terminate it or your program will fail to terminate on error if its output is redirected to a disk file.

write(2) is a blocking call (unless O_NONBLOCK is set), so you should never have a partial write while the descriptor is connected to something valid.

please demonstrate that consumer.

on linux there is no way to do this without your consumer being a kernel driver that actually [purposefully accepts one byte at a time. all file io and pipes have basically no way to accept one byte only (except EOF)

you wouldn't see it on Linux as pipes are implemented using complete pages (always powers of 2), but there's probably some OS out there with a different implementation where you can set the buffer size to be an odd number, and then you'd see the bug with plain simple cat

I didn't say you'd likely see it in practice :)