I deal with a lot of very large files on a regular basis. I've noticed that when I delve into these directories using in mintty and issue the command ls -l (or ls -color=auto), a very large junk of memory is consumed. The memory leak seems to be proportionate to the number and size of files within the containing folder.
To reproduce: generate or use a folder containing 50 (or more) 2G+ files. // In this demonstration, I a ran the command on a directory containing 143 files ranging in size from 2GB to 5GB. $> free total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 50276004 16465148 33810856 0 0 33810856 Swap: 12058624 186468 11872156 $> ls -l -color=auto . (contents displayed after some delay) $> free total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 50276004 19844660 30431344 0 0 30431344 Swap: 12058624 186460 11872164 // After 10 consecutive executions of the 'ls -al --color=auto' command in this directory, ls has consumed 86% of my system's real memory. $> free total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 50276004 43587560 6688444 0 0 6688444 Swap: 12058624 301068 11757556 // If I continue (usually unknowingly) my system will completely be depleted of resources to the point my mouse will barely respond to movement. -- -- Problem reports: https://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: https://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: https://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: https://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple