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Re: grep crashes machine



On Sun, Jul 23, 2000 at 04:17:18AM +0200, Christian Pernegger wrote:
> Hallo!
> 
> I just stumbled upon the following. If I do
> 
> # cd /
> # grep -r * stuff
> 
> it outputs files for maybe half a second then hangs the whole machine. The
> last matches were under /dev. I can't remember grep ever scanning device
> files, but maybe it's just me...
> 
> If I do the same as user the process exits at the same point with a message
> amounting to "out of memory."
> 
> The machine is a P3-650E with 256MB RAM (+256MB swap) and ~200MB files on
> all disks. A quite fresh potato-test-2 install.

Nothing specific -- haven't tried this and don't care to given your
results.

In general, it's not a good idea to go rooting around through /dev,
particularly as root.

You might want to install and configure glimpse or sglimpse to to
pattern searching through your system files.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com>     http://www.netcom.com/~kmself
 Evangelist, Opensales, Inc.                    http://www.opensales.org
  What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?   Debian GNU/Linux rocks!
   http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/    K5: http://www.kuro5hin.org
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