On Fri, Feb 25, 2005 at 12:14:04PM +0100, Ramiro Aceves wrote: > Hello FreeBSD friends: > > I am running a FreeBSD 5.3 system with 64MB RAM and 150 MB swap. > > Yesterday I entered the command: > > # grep -R something /
Running a grep on an entire system as root is a bad idea. At least limit to certain filesystems. You probably hit a file under /dev/ and caused grep to hang. It's possible that as root, certain device files might hang the system, but nothing comes to mind at the moment unless /dev/io could do it. Also, think about what happens when grep hit's /dev/zero. It will never finish. > > and after a while, my system did not respond. I do not remember the exact > messages as I am on a winbugs at the University. The error was about > swapping. I could switch among terminals but the system was dead. I needed > to reboot. > > I rebooted and tried again watching "top" output and I could see as swap > usage was incresing very quickly until it ran out of swap space and the swap > pager failed. > > Was my sytem dead? or, is it possible to recover from that state without > rebooting? How is it possible that a simple command like this could > auto-kill the machine? > > What is the recomended fix for this?: > > a- Asigning more swap. > b- Not executing that command anymore. > > > Thank you very much for your advices and help. > > Ramiro > > > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" -- I sense much NT in you. NT leads to Bluescreen. Bluescreen leads to downtime. Downtime leads to suffering. NT is the path to the darkside. Powerful Unix is. Public Key: ftp://ftp.tallye.com/pub/lorenl_pubkey.asc Fingerprint: B3B9 D669 69C9 09EC 1BCD 835A FAF3 7A46 E4A3 280C _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
