Subject: bug#21527: closed (Re: avoiding "memory exhausted" in 2.5.4?)

From: [email-masked] (GNU bug Tracking System)
Date: Sat, 24 Sep 2016 21:41:02 +0000

Your bug report

#21527: avoiding "memory exhausted" in 2.5.4?

which was filed against the grep package, has been closed.

The explanation is attached below, along with your original report.
If you require more details, please reply to [email-masked].

-- 
21527: http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=21527
GNU Bug Tracking System
Contact [email-masked] with problems

Subject: Re: avoiding "memory exhausted" in 2.5.4?
From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
To: Aaron Davies <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 24 Sep 2016 14:40:23 -0700
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

No further comment and it has been about a year. Closing the bug report.

Subject: avoiding "memory exhausted" in 2.5.4?
From: Aaron Davies <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 20 Sep 2015 17:47:24 -0400
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

i'm trying to grep an entire volume for a short, fixed string, but no matter what i do, i keep getting "grep: memory exhausted" errors

the only versions i have immediately available to me are 2.5.4 and and earlier; i can probably get an upgrade to the current one installed eventually, but it will take some time

since the string is fixed, i'm using -F

i've tried both with and without --mmap

i've tried both a -r recursive grep and separate runs using find -print0|xargs -r0 grep

since i'm really only interested in finding the file containing the string and if might be a binary file, i've also tried with and without -z on the theory that the problem was binaries without newlines, and NUL was more likely to occur than newline in such files (a suggestion i found online)

none of it's helped -- they all fail with "memory exhausted" at some point

does anyone have any other suggestions as to how to solve this? is it something fixed in a more recent grep? is there some other set of tools i could be using instead?

i'm currently working on getting some statistics on the line lengths (whether delimited by \n or \0) of the files involved, but that may take a bit of time
-- 
Aaron Davies
[email-masked]