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 aaron.dav...@gmail.com
