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From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) Description of problem: When sorting large amounts of data using the general numeric sort flag (-g), it takes huge amounts of memory, and may eventually crash. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 4.5.3 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.perl -le'print rand() foreach 1..5_000_000'|/bin/sort -g > /dev/null 2. 3. Actual Results: Depending on the size of the input, either uses much more memory than it should, or it dies with a memory error (either "Killed" or "Sort: memory exhausted"). Expected Results: I expect it use about 33M of main memory (plus whatever tmp file space is necessary) to finish the sort. Additional info: The binary reports itself as gnu's sort 4.5.3: $ /bin/sort --version sort (coreutils) 4.5.3 Written by Mike Haertel and Paul Eggert. However, if I download and build the 4.5.3 coreutils source from gnu, that executable does not exhibit this problem. (It performs the sort using about 33M of main memory)
Indeed. This comes from the i18n patch. I've fixed this in CVS, and the fix will be part of any future coreutils update for RHEL3. A fixed package will also appear in Fedora development tree shortly, FWIW.
An advisory has been issued which should help the problem described in this bug report. This report is therefore being closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For more information on the solution and/or where to find the updated files, please follow the link below. You may reopen this bug report if the solution does not work for you. http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2005-544.html