bash oom problem

[psmith]

hi list, whilst trying to run this bash command

for w in {A..Z}{A..Z}{A..Z}{A..Z}{A..Z}{A..Z}{A..Z}{A..Z} ;do echo 
$w;done > wl1

on my aspire one (which is running rawhide) it kept crashing my system 
down with no reasons shown in any of the logs, so i tried it on my 
desktop machine which is an athlonx2 6000 with 2GB of ram and a raid0 
array, with 2GB of swap and it too crashed the terminal but it did give 
me an error and it turned out to be an oom error so i tried upping the 
swap partition to 10GB and i'm still getting an oom crash, can anyone 
suggest a way of getting the command to dump the output to disk each 
time it gets close to running out of memory? or is this command always 
doomed to fail?

tia
phil