fgrep: not enough memory

[jerry1]

I know what your thinking.

This system is: Model:9000/800/S16K-A
24448 megabytes

I am doing a global find with fgrep.
Excluding NFS mounts of course.

Why is fgrep barking. Is it some kind of buffer
limitation, kernel parm, etc...??

[Jeff Schussele · Accepted solution]

Hi Jerry,

Several things:

1)Does grep -F ...... do the same thing? fgrep is obsolete now.
2) swap reservation exceeded?
swapinfo -tam
3) max?siz kernel parm maxxed out?
4) ulimit?

If you're grepping the entire system via find, then I'd suspect #3 or #4 is your problem.

Rgds,
Jeff

[A. Clay Stephenson]

I suspect that you are grepping on a non-text file so that unexpected behavior is encounter. You probably should put a 'file' command in and text to see if this is an ASCII file before grepping.

[Elmar P. Kolkman]

Have you tried the fgrep command on a single file, to see if your problem is with fgrep or the specific file?

The '-type f' in the commandline for the find command might help if the fgrep line works on normal files.

If not, you might make a script that calls fgrep after logging the file it runs on to see what file is causing fgrep to fail...

[jerry1]

Here is the script. OS is HP-UX 11.11

#!/bin/ksh

find / -fsonly hfs -fsonly vxfs -type f -exec fgrep -l "128.166." {} \;>$1.ip

strings=`cat ./exclude.strings`

cat $1.ip|egrep -i -v "$strings">$1.ip.1

----------------------------------------

maxdsiz 131072 - 0-503866 Pages -
maxdsiz_64bit 262144 - 1024-1073479679 Pages
maxssiz 16384 - 0-98048 Pages -
maxssiz_64bit 2048 - 4-262144 Pages -
maxtsiz 65536 - 0-503859 Pages -
maxtsiz_64bit 262144 - 1024-1073741823 Pages

[A. Clay Stephenson]

As I tried to explain yesterday, you need to check to see if you are grepping a text file. Grepping a binary file (e.g. an executable) will yield absolutely chaotic results -- including program crashes. A -f find test is a necessary but not sufficient test. It determines that the file is a regular file but it does not determine that the file is a text file -- the file command does that.


You need to do something like this:

find / -fsonly hfs -fsonly vxfs -type f -exec ftest.sh {} \;>$1.ip

Now ftest.sh looks like this:
#!/usr/bin/sh

FNAME=${1}
file ${FNAME} | grep -q "text"
STAT=${?}
if [[ ${STAT} -eq 0 ]]
then
fgrep -l "128.166." ${FNAME}
fi
exit 0

This code could be made more efficient via xargs but that is left as an exercise for the reader.