Re: Memory leak in Solaris 2.7 kernel?

[Doc Savage <doxavg () GENOCIDE2600 COM>]

Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here, but this is just a shell
expansion that gets a little carried away.

ls ../* expands to parent directory, all files
ls ../*/../* expands to parent directory, all files, parent directory, all
files....nice little loop if the parent directory has a child (whihc it
obviously does since we're in one).

Bug?  not in my opinion, bad feature, probably.  This is shell expansion
at it's finest, I don't claim it to be wrong.  FWIW, this works in both
bash 2.04 and ksh on OpenBSD 2.8 x86 (not that OS matters, this should
work in any shell that does wildcard expansion).

--Dox

On Sat, 17 Mar 2001, Emre Yildirim wrote:

> Here is what I got:
>
> NetBSD:
> **************************
> ~# uname -smr
> NetBSD 1.5S i386
> ~# ../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*
> bash: xmalloc: cannot allocate 6023 bytes (0 bytes allocated)
> Connection to silicon closed.
> **************************
>
> IRIX:
> **************************
> # hinv | head -n 5
> FPU: MIPS R10010 Floating Point Chip Revision: 0.0
> CPU: MIPS R10000 Processor Chip Revision: 2.6
> 8 195 MHZ IP27 Processors
> Main memory size: 2048 Mbytes
> Instruction cache size: 32 Kbytes
> # uname -smr
> IRIX64 6.5 IP27
> # ../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*
> Out of memory.
> ***************************
>
> Solaris:
> ***************************
> # uname -a
> SunOS sync 5.7 Generic_106541-10 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
> # psrinfo -v
> Status of processor 0 as of: 03/17/01 19:40:57
>   Processor has been on-line since 03/05/01 15:18:50.
>   The sparcv9 processor operates at 296 MHz,
>         and has a sparcv9 floating point processor.
> Status of processor 1 as of: 03/17/01 19:40:57
>   Processor has been on-line since 03/05/01 15:18:53.
>   The sparcv9 processor operates at 296 MHz,
>         and has a sparcv9 floating point processor.
> #
> # ls ../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*/../*
> ^C
> ^C
>
> Shell doesn't respond anymore, but load stays around 1.00.
> ***************************
>
> Linux:  I've tried this on Mandrake 7.2, and the system becomes very
> unstable and freezes in the end.  I had to hard reset the computer.
>
> My $0.02:  I don't really see this as a bug, since it has to be
> executed as root, and depending on your shell, you can limit normal
> users' memory usage (ulimit/limit?).
>
> --
> Experience varies directly with equipment ruined.