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Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 01:14:43 +0300
From: Eygene Ryabinkin <rea-fbsd@codelabs.ru>
To: Garrett Cooper <youshi10@u.washington.edu>
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Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Possible grep(1) bug or user error :)?
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Garret,

Sat, Mar 17, 2007 at 02:47:43PM -0700, Garrett Cooper wrote:
> I was recently grepping a directory and outputting to a file located in the 
> same directory as follows:
> 
> grep -ri {key} * > {key}.found
> 
> The thing is that grep kept on feeding off of the {key}.found file and 
> eventually ate up all the free space on the device (~12GB).

And what you expected? The file {key}.found was created prior to the
expansion of '*', so grep was parsing that file and feeding it with
the messages about the lines with {key} that were found. And these
lines also provoked grep to add more lines about the {key} found, and
so on. I think you got the idea of the infinite cycle you created.
-- 
Eygene