bug#21527: avoiding "memory exhausted" in 2.5.4?

[Aaron Davies]

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
address@hidden