Writing an empty buffer to stdout can close the pipe

[PeterReid]

Writing an empty buffer to stdout from node caused a ReadFile call on the other end of the pipe to return FALSE and then triggered an assert in node. This only seems to happen if the pipe is being read from synchronously -- overlapped IO worked fine. The most likely suspect looks like WriteFile being called with nNumberOfBytesToWrite = 0.

Quoth msdn:

A value of zero specifies a null write operation. The behavior of a null write operation depends on the underlying file system or communications technology.

The null write operation here seems to be closing the stream.

[ryancole]

Can you provide an example?