I killed my system with grep

[Lowell Gilbert]

"Ramiro Aceves" <ea1abz at wanadoo.es> writes:

> 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.

c- Setting user limits in login.conf(5).