Comment 6 for bug 897341

It appears to be a bug with xdg-utils, or at least triggered from there:

Looking at the strace output, there's a sleep process being invoked, which "hangs"/waits in the end:

    15202 0.000070 execve("/bin/sleep", ["sleep", "50"], [/* 71 vars */] <unfinished ...>

This originates from /usr/lib/vlc/plugins/misc/libxdg_screensaver_plugin.so (where it gets cloned/created from).

Use of this plugin/feature can be toggled in VLC using the "disable-screensaver" setting, which I have enabled (appears to be the default).

This comes from screensaver_suspend_loop out of xdg-screensaver from xdg-utils:

    (while [ -f "$screensaver_file" ]; do $*; sleep 50; done) > /dev/null 2> /dev/null &

This background process seems to be blocking, if stderr is being redirected from vlc, and stdout being read by e.g. grep.

I have not investigated how this worked previously, but it must have changed somehow.

Is there a way to make the "vlc pipeline" end before the subprocess ends itself?