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

[Aaron Davies]

On Sep 20, 2015, at 5:47 PM, Aaron Davies <address@hidden> wrote:

> 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

i forgot to mention, i'm also using -l on all these--i don't care about the 
line the string is found in (which may not even be a meaningful concept with 
binary files), only the file
-- 
Aaron Davies
address@hidden