Package: grep Version: 2.5.3~dfsg-3 Severity: wishlist Hi,
I recently tried to find a string from a large hard disk image and was surprised when grep returned "Cannot allocate memory". Apparently the image contained so large areas of zeroes that grep ran out of memory when I it tried to hold those areas in memory (it was probably looking for "\n"?). My wish is that grep would use constant amount of memory vrt. the size of input (hard disk image). You can reproduce this problem with $ dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=1k | grep x 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 4.49402 seconds, 239 MB/s grep: (standard input): Cannot allocate memory Note that busybox's grep handles this case just fine: $ dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=1k | busybox grep x 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 349.732 seconds, 3.1 MB/s I did these tests on an 32-bit x86 system with 4 GB of RAM. I am not sure if this bug should be seen as a duplicate of #195719 or #358858. best regards, Timo Lindfors -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
