Subject: Re: [bug-diffutils] bug#71529: Crash for large directory due to memory outage

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Jun 2024 17:07:26 -0700

What do you mean by "crash"? Did you need to reboot the system, or did 
"diff" dump core, or did diff print a diagnostic "memory exhausxted"?

Can you send a recipe for reproducing the problem? I didn't have any 
trouble running diff 3.10 on a Fedora 40 machine with only 8 GiB RAM, in 
directories with 100,000 files. The following shell commands succeeded 
quietly:

   mkdir d e
   (cd d && touch $(seq 100000))
   (cd e && touch $(seq 100000))
   diff -r d e