Re: sort: memory exhausted with 50GB file

[Leo Butler]

On Sun, 27 Jan 2008, Paul Eggert wrote:

< 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.


I inferred the error from the symptoms and I wrote before testing the 
inference. 
I have since checked and uintmax_t appears to be correctly defined.

I believe that the coreutils info documentation could benefit from an explicit 
definition of 'characters' vs. 'bytes' in the documentation of wc and allied 
programs. It took me a rather long time to infer the correct definition but 
once 
I knew it, the diagnosis was trivial. I needn't have bothered you folks at 
all...

LB