At the risk of annoying folks uninterested in this problem, here is a simpler test case:
Cygwin64> date; seq 10000 | wc -l; date Tue Jul 15 15:30:03 EDT 2014 10000 Tue Jul 15 15:31:03 EDT 2014 Cygwin64> The output ("10000") occurs immediately and then the hang for precisely one minute before the 2nd date. As before: Cygwin64> uname -srvmo CYGWIN_NT-6.1 1.7.31s(0.273/5/3) 20140715 15:34:37 x86_64 Cygwin Cygwin64> --Ken Nellis