On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 7:16 AM, Aaron Davies <aaron.dav...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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?
2.5.4 is more than 6 years old. Please try the latest release, grep-2.21. There have been many improvements (at least 16 stable releases) since 2.5.4.
