Re: Bash monopolizing or eating the RAM MEMORY

[Noilson Caio]

thank you so much Mr. Wooledge. i guess that BUG is a strong word for this case. i fully agree about "his is not a bash bug.  It's a problem with your approach.", actuality that's my preoccupation.  can you help me to understand because 10^6 strings pull the trigger of "Argument list too long" and 10^7(n+1) don't ? i have afraid that a non-root user can compromise a linux box intentionally. the memory needs be eaten until other threshold can break it.

Thank you again.

On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 1:50 PM, Greg Wooledge <wooledg@eeg.ccf.org> wrote:

On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 12:17:39PM -0300, Noilson Caio wrote:
> 1 - Using mkdir -p {0..9}/{0..9}/{0..9}/{0..9}/{0..9}/ - ( 5 levels ) No
> problems

10 to the 5th power (100,000) strings generated.  Sloppy, but viable on
today's computers.  You're relying on your operating system to allow
an extraordinary large set of arguments to processes.  I'm guessing
Linux.

> 2 - Using mkdir -p {0..9}/{0..9}/{0..9}/{0..9}/{0..9}/{0..9}/ - (6 levels )
> We have a problem - "Argument list too long".

You have two problems.  The first is that you are generating 10^6
(1 million) strings in memory, all at once.  The second is that you are
attempting to pass all of these strings as arguments to a single mkdir
process.  Apparently even your system won't permit that.

> 3 - Using mkdir -p {0..9}/{0..9}/{0..9}/{0..9}/{0..9}/{0..9}/{0..9}/ - (7
> levels ) - Ops, we don't have more "Argument list too long" now we have "Cannot
> allocate memory".

10 million strings, all at once.  Each one is ~15 bytes (counting the NUL
and slashes), so you're looking at something like 150 megabytes.

This is not a bash bug.  It's a problem with your approach.  You wouldn't
call it a bug in C, if you wrote a C program that tried to allocate 150
megabytes of variables and got an "out of memory" as a result.  The same
applies to any other programming language.

What you need to do is actually think about how big a chunk of memory
(and argument list) you can handle in a single call to mkdir -p, and
just do that many at once.  Call mkdir multiple times, in order to get
the full task done.  Don't assume bash will handle that for you.

--

Noilson Caio Teixeira de Araújo
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