Re: possible gawk memory leak?

[arnold]

Hi.

Thank you for sending a bug report.

This is not a bug.

/dev/zero is an infinite source of zero bytes. Reading from it NEVER
returns end-of-file. Thus gawk starts reading and keeps reading in the
hope that it will see a record separator character. Since the default
separator character is newline, and /dev/zero never supplies a newline,
it just keeps on reading until it can no longer allocate memory.

In short, "don't do that". :-)

Thanks,

Arnold

Eckard Brauer <eckard.brauer@gmx.de> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> playing around I just observed a little problem with gawk I can't
> really explain well (gawk-5.1.0, Linux (Gentoo), x86_64). Executing
>
> awk 'NR==4{exit}{print NR}' /dev/zero
>
> gawk tries to allocate all available memory and so freezes the whole
> host for some time. Doing that in a memory limited environment to
> preserve disk swapping only let's happen the crash earlier and without
> system freeze:
>
>  $ ulimit -m 8192000
>  $ ulimit -v 8192000
>  $ awk 'NR==4{exit}{print NR}' /dev/zero
> awk: fatal: io.c:3464:grow_iop_buffer: iop->buf: cannot reallocate 8589934593 
> bytes of memory: Cannot allocate memory
>
> So if that's not an individual problem, could you either explain the
> reason(s) for that behaviour, or fix it if it's unintended?
>
> Thanks in advance && best regards,
> Eckard Brauer