Hi all, Here is a small test which shows what happens:
limit=500000000; x=1; while [ $x -le $limit ]; do printf "%010d\n" $x; x=$(( $x + 1)); done >bigfile.txt while read line; do echo -e "TEST\t$line"; done >bug.txt Basically the first line creates a big 5Gb text file containing 500 millions numbered lines (no problem here). Then the second line reads this file line by line and adds a prefix 'TEST' to each. The problem is that after the line 0195225788, it goes wrong and loops on the following sequence: TEST 0195225788 TEST 225778 TEST 0195225779 TEST 0195225780 TEST 0195225781 TEST 0195225782 TEST 0195225783 TEST 0195225784 TEST 0195225785 TEST 0195225786 TEST 0195225787 TEST 0195225788 TEST 225778 (so don't forget to stop the script, the bug.txt file will grow infinitely!) tested on an Ubuntu 11.04: uname -a Linux bloom 2.6.38-8-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP Mon Apr 11 03:31:50 UTC 2011 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux bash --version GNU bash, version 4.2.8(1)-release (i686-pc-linux-gnu) I posted this issue yesterday in the Ubuntu forums, the problem was confirmed by another user: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1808384 Regards Erwan
