On Sep 20, 2015, at 5:47 PM, Aaron Davies <aaron.dav...@gmail.com> 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 aaron.dav...@gmail.com
