I killed my system with grep

[Ramiro Aceves]

Hello FreeBSD friends:

I am running a FreeBSD 5.3 system with 64MB RAM and 150 MB swap.

Yesterday I entered the command:

# grep -R something /

and after a while, my system did not respond. I do not remember the exact
messages as I am on a winbugs at the University. The error was about
swapping. I could switch among terminals but the system was dead. I needed
to reboot.

I rebooted and tried again watching "top" output and I could see as swap
usage was incresing very quickly until it ran out of swap space and the swap
pager failed.

Was my sytem dead? or, is it possible to recover from that state without
rebooting? How is it possible that a simple command like this could
auto-kill the machine?

What is the recomended fix for this?:

a- Asigning more swap.
b- Not executing that command anymore.


Thank you very much for your advices and help.

Ramiro