Re: sort: memory exhausted with 50GB file

[Paul Eggert]

Leo Butler <address@hidden> writes:

> wc is counting with long ints, and the first line of this 50GB file is a 
> string 
> of \0 whose length appears to be negative when counted with long ints. 
> (Details 
> below).
>
> I believe that this must be an error in the header file where 'uintmax_t' is
> defined. 

If the header misdefines uintmax_t, that will break several programs
in coreutils, not just 'wc' (or 'sort', for that matter).  Can you
investigate why this is happening?  You can build coreutils 6.10 from
scratch and look in config.log to see why it is mishandling uintmax_t.