Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 12:14:04 +0100 From: "Ramiro Aceves" <ea1abz@wanadoo.es> To: "freebsd-questions-en" <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org> Subject: I killed my system with grep Message-ID: <003801c51b2b$1deecc60$04cf589d@simula.eis.uva.es>
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Hello FreeBSD friends: I am running a FreeBSD 5.3 system with 64MB RAM and 150 MB swap. Yesterday I entered the command: # grep -R something / and after a while, my system did not respond. I do not remember the exact messages as I am on a winbugs at the University. The error was about swapping. I could switch among terminals but the system was dead. I needed to reboot. I rebooted and tried again watching "top" output and I could see as swap usage was incresing very quickly until it ran out of swap space and the swap pager failed. Was my sytem dead? or, is it possible to recover from that state without rebooting? How is it possible that a simple command like this could auto-kill the machine? What is the recomended fix for this?: a- Asigning more swap. b- Not executing that command anymore. Thank you very much for your advices and help. Ramiro
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