David Wetzel wrote:

> > From: Simon Burge <simonb@netbsd.org>
> 
> > Hmm, it shouldn't die like that though.  How much physical memory and
> > swap space do you have, and how long does it take to die?
> 
> dave@alice>dmesg | grep 'real mem'
> real mem  = 133824512
> 
> dave@alice>swapctl -lk
> Device      1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Priority
> /dev/sd1a      205078        4   205074     0%    0
> 
> It dies fast. In less than 2 minutes. I do not want to try this again.

In the scheme of things I'd call that pretty slow :-)  Maybe your
machine has swapped itself to death.  It looks like you're using
{t,}csh - what's the output of "limit"?  If "datasize" is >> 128M
that may explain some things.  I know you're wary of killing your
machine again, but something like:

	limit data 16384
	grep creationDate Kurs.db | wc -l

_should_ fail quickly with an "out of memory" error.  I guess this
depends on what your datasize limit is though...

> > In your case David:
> >
> > 	strings Kurs.db | grep creationDate | wc -l
> >
> 
> dave@alice>strings Kurs.db | grep creationDate | wc -l
> 
>   852144

Well, at least you have what you're after :-)

Simon.