I killed my system with grep

[Ramiro Aceves]

Loren M. Lang wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 25, 2005 at 11:42:48PM -0500, Parv wrote:
> 
>>in message <20050225135707.GC18789 at alzatex.com>,
>>wrote Loren M. Lang thusly...
>>
>>>On Fri, Feb 25, 2005 at 12:14:04PM +0100, Ramiro Aceves wrote:
>>>
>>>>I am running a FreeBSD 5.3 system with 64MB RAM and 150 MB swap.
>>>>
>>>>Yesterday I entered the command:
>>>>
>>>># grep -R something /
>>>
>>>You probably hit a file under /dev/ and caused grep to hang.  It's
>>>possible that as root, certain device files might hang the system,
>>>but nothing comes to mind at the moment unless /dev/io could do
>>>it.  Also, think about what happens when grep hit's /dev/zero.  It
>>>will never finish.
>>
>>Would using -I option (not search text-like files) help to avoid
>>above described hang ups in /dev?
> 
> 
> No, it still searches all files, it just doesn't print the usual line
> that it matched, only whether there was success or not.  You really just
> need to make sure grep never goes into /dev.  Since your running 5.x,
> /dev is it's own filesystem of a unique type, so the following command
> will run grep on only filesystems of type ufs, which won't include
> network filesystems, or /dev:
> 
> find / -fstype ufs -exec grep -H something {} \;
> 
> 
>>
>>  - Parv
>>
>>-- 
> 
> 

Many thanks for the valuable info!
I will never grep into /dev

Ramiro.