On Fri, Nov 15, 2002 at 08:23:24AM -0500, Jeff Bailey wrote: > On Fri, 2002-11-15 at 04:00, Herbert Xu wrote: > > > > But the original bug seems to be more of an issue: shouldn't it be a bug > > > that tail chews up infinite amounts of memory when it can't find an > > > end-of-line char? IMHO, tail should just bail out when it finds a line > > > which is more than, say 10MB long (I'm being generous about limits here). > > > I mean, when there is no newline for 10MB's worth of data, is there even > > > any usefulness to tail anymore? I just can't imagine any scenario where > > > it'd actually do anything *useful*. > > > No, we should not impose arbitrary limits on applications. > > Sure, but it would also be reasonable to flush the buffer to the screen > every (screensize/2) so that a human could follow it. [snip]
Yes!! That's a *very* good idea. Personally, I don't like the idea of imposing arbitrary limits on things like line length either; but I was confronted with a program that was consuming resources endlessly without doing anything useful. Flushing the buffer once in a while is a very good solution to this. T -- You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely. -- azephrahel