>>>>> On Wed, 19 Sep 2001, "Norbert" == Norbert Veber wrote: [snip] Norbert> --> Now run ls.
I can reproduce this. [snip] Norbert> Be prepared to abort it before it consumes all the available Norbert> memory on your system. [snip] Norbert> To me it looks like this would be a bug in ls, though I Norbert> cant figure out what is causing it, or why it happens after Norbert> running purity. The environment is unchanged, the aliases are Norbert> unchanged, the only difference is that ls no longer works. Did you check the COLUMNS environment variable? brooks% echo $COLUMNS 80 brooks% /usr/games/purity list welcome to the purity test. the current available tests are: mtrek - see how muck of an mtrek geek you are... nerd - tests to see how "nerdy" you are... hacker - a hard core computer hacker purity test. format - an explanation of the data file format (for writing your own tests) sample - prints a generic sample datafile to run each test, use "purity <type_of_test> [flags]". bye. brooks% echo $COLUMNS 49151 IIRC the memory use of the algorithm ls uses to sort its output into varying-length columns increases greatly with wider terminals. Something this absurdly large will cause the algorithm to start eating RAM, just as reported. However, *why* COLUMNS gets set so big is another matter... purity seems to be causing this. No idea why or how, but it seems to be the culprit. thanks, -chris -- "Meat. They're made out of meat." "It's better than bad, it's good!" (I subscribe to all lists that I post to; please do not Cc me on list reply) Chris Danis [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Debian GNU/Linux - www.debian.org [EMAIL PROTECTED]