Re: find: memory exhausted

[James Youngman]

On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 1:23 AM, Angel Tsankov <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> What could be the reason to get a 'memory exhausted' error when running find
> 4.2.23 from a makefile such as this one:
>
> all:
>   find . -exec true \;

It's possible that the version of Make you are using exports a large
number of environment variables, and this will affect the number and
size of command-line arguments that find can issue to execve().
However, it seems to me that this is not precisely the problem, since
this command line does not include {}.

>
> It might be worthwhile to note that this command works when run from a shell
> or whithout '-exec true\;'  Also, the directory where the command is
> executed contains jsut a few files and no subdirectories.

Hmm, thanks for the problem report.    However, before I look into
this further, please try again with a recent version of findutils (for
example 4.4.0, which is almost 3 years newer than the version you are
using) and tell us whether that's still affected.

Thanks,
James.