Grep buffers entire lines into memory. When a line is greater than the virtual memory capacity of the machine it crashes, in the process it hurts performance and gives inaccurate results. This bug depends on the rawhide bug 198165 (I don't expect a fix to go in to RHEL until after it's been tested in rawhide/Fedora).
I am seeing this bug just doing my normal development work. It would be useful for me to get it fixed.
This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux maintenance release. Product Management has requested further review of this request by Red Hat Engineering, for potential inclusion in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Update release for currently deployed products. This request is not yet committed for inclusion in an Update release.
As documented in #198165 create a large sparse file and grep it.
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-2007-0281.html
Note that the fix caused another problem, so it needs to be adapted. See bug #440258 for details.