In message <200001281632.LAA17689@istari.sandelman.ottawa.on.ca>, "Michael C. R
ichardson" writes:
>    Simon> The maintainer of GNU grep says that you should have enough
>    Simon> virtual memory to allocate the longest line possible, and doesn't
>    Simon> want to change that behaviour...

>  Huh? That's silly.
>  I might be grepping from a network pipe, or as you tried a file of 
>infinite size.

Not longest file, longest line.

He's right; it's impossible for grep to do the right thing reading from a
pipe without enough memory to store the longest line.  (After all, it has
to hold the whole line until it's done, incase it matches something at the
very end.)

There may be cases when it can avoid this, but I think they're nugatory.

-s