grep bug
Steve Young
sdyoung at vt220.org
Fri Feb 13 18:58:21 PST 2004
On Feb 9, 2004, at 12:04 AM, Rob MacGregor wrote:
> I can confirm this behaviour under 5.2-CURRENT from the 5th of
> February:
>
> -bash-2.05b$ grep -r foo / >/dev/null
> grep: /dev/network: Permission denied
> grep: /dev/geom.ctl: Permission denied
> grep: /dev/devctl: Permission denied
> grep: /dev/ata: Permission denied
> grep in realloc(): error: allocation failed
> Abort trap (core dumped)
> Feb 9 06:59:59 phoenix kernel: pid 55974 (grep), uid 1001: exited on
> signal
> 6 (
> core dumped)
Hi Rob,
The problem here is that grep is trying to grep /dev/zero and is
trying to allocate all your memory in the process of handling this
infinite input. This will happen when grep is used on any of the /dev
files that spit out unlimited output, such as /dev/random and the sound
input device, I suspect. Arguably grep shouldn't eat up all your
memory when this happens but that's more of a GNU issue than a FreeBSD
issue, and really it would be kind of hard to handle
gracefully/portably. Have you reported this to the gnu bugs mailing
address? It may conceivably use 100% CPU but it shouldn't try and grab
100% memory too.
Thanks,
Steve.
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