"Broken pipe" means that greenstone was talking to another program and
that program unexpectedly quit, so no more data could be "piped" to it.

The gdbm error gives a hint as to what that other program was doing, but
without any extra information it is difficult to tell what went wrong,
and where it happened. Perhaps the filesystem that greenstone is on ran
out of disk space and no more data could be written?

Another alternative is that the gdbm file became too big for the file
system type it is on... some linux file system types have file size
limits of 4.2 GB (2 to the power of 32 bytes).

You can save a log of what greenstone is doing during the build process
by running a command similar to
$ buildcol.pl (collectionname) 2>&1 | tee build.log
to save all the output to a file named "build.log". (This command
assumes you are running greenstone on unix or mac os x, and have set up
the environment correctly by running the setup.bash script.

John McPherson