Severe memleak in sequence expressions?

[Marc Schiffbauer]

Hi all,

I think there is a severe memleak in bash.

I had this effect with bash 4.2.10 (Ubuntu Linux) as well as 
bash 4.1.9 on Gentoo Linux.

To make it short:

echo {0..10000000}>/dev/null

This makes my system starting to swap as bash will allocate several GiB of
memory.

If I choose a way bigger number bash "just" seems to crash:

mschiff@lisa ~ $ echo {1..1000000000000000000}>/dev/null
bash: xmalloc: cannot allocate 11892949016 bytes (135168 bytes allocated)
mschiff@lisa ~ $

Is this a bug?

Please do not try this on a productive machine!

-Marc
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