grep: memory exhausted

[Bill Tangren]

Gavin McDonald wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:redhat-list-
>> bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Manuel Arostegui Ramirez
>> Sent: Tuesday, September 19, 2006 9:25 AM
>> To: General Red Hat Linux discussion list
>> Subject: Re: grep: memory exhausted
>>
>> El Martes, 19 de Septiembre de 2006 17:16, Bill Tangren escribió:
>>> I am occasionally getting the following kernel message:
>>>
>>> Sep 19 08:54:02 mach2 kernel: usbhid: probe of 3-2.4:1.1 failed with
>> error
>>> -5
>>>
>>> I did a grep to find all occurrences of usbhid in the logs, and this is
>>> what happened:
>>>
>>> # cd /var/log
>>> # grep usbhid *
>>> anaconda.syslog:<6>usbcore: registered new driver usbhid
>>> dmesg:usbcore: registered new driver usbhid
>>> grep: memory exhausted
>>>
>>> I found this unusual, as I have 2 GB of ram (not a lot these days, but
>> more
>>> than I've ever had before).
>>>
>>> Does anyone know why grep would be exhausting available ram?
>> Maybe is a /proc issue.
>> Maybe grep is eating all the input it can from files in /proc.
>>
>> Just an opinion.
>>
>> --
>> Manuel Arostegui Ramirez.
>>
> 
> what does a 
> 
>  #ls -hal /var/log
> 
> tell you?

total 4.1M
and then a list of the contents. This machine is not (yet) in service, so there 
isn't much in the logs.