Re: du 4.1 crashes linux system

[Jim Meyering]

André Somers <address@hidden> wrote:
> When I run du on a folder with *lots* of files (I estimate anywhere between
> 200,000 to 400,000) over many subdirectories, du manages to crash my linux
> sytem. I run du as a normal user. If I look at the systemlog, there is no
> information to be found there. I would say that a normal program should not
> be able to crash the whole system, so this may be a problem with the kernel
> and not in the GNU fileutils...

Thanks for the report.  I would suspect a kernel problem.
The next time you run the offending command it would be good to monitor
memory usage, e.g. by running `top' in another window.

du from the fileutils-4.1 package is about 2.5 years old.
Please try a newer version of du, from the coreutils package, e.g.

  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.0.tar.gz
  (coreutils is the union of fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils)

or, the very latest:

  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.0.91.tar.bz2