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Re: grep freezes system



On Sun, Dec 29, 2002 at 10:51:04AM +0100, Robert Land wrote:
> Using recursive grep for large directory structures
> caused the entire system to freeze.
> 
> The same happens for "find / * -group xx_x".
> 
> I'm still using potato and the current available
> findutils deb package.
> 
> 
> Have any users had this before?

Totally hung?  Hmm, usually trying a recursive grep of the entire
filesystem will give you an out-of-memory error unless you have
several GB of core.

Two possible solutions:

1) Make an educated guess on what directory it's in and move closer to
   it (at least one level in, more if it's a particularly deep part of
   the filesystem like /usr).

2) Go buy a few gigabytes(!) of RAM and try again.  From my
   experiance, adding swap will not help you when you try to grep the
   world.

-- 
 .''`.     Baloo <baloo@ursine.dyndns.org>
: :'  :    proud Debian admin and user
`. `'`
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than to fix a system

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