Justin, 2014-06-08 6:19 GMT+02:00 Justin Delegard <justdeleg...@gmail.com>: > When running patch on large files, I'm surprised to see that the heap usage > of patch increases to roughly the size of the file being patched. Is that > expected?
yes. > Is there any combination of options that can patch with a fixed memory usage? Normally, patch will try to read in the entire input file. When that fails and patch runs out of memory, "plan B" is to be very conservative with memory. You can force patch into "plan B" with option --debug=16 but I wouldn't recommend it; the OS's virtual memory management will do a much better job than that. Andreas