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Path: utzoo!linus!vaxine!wjh12!n44a!hscfvax!chin
From: chin@hscfvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Subject: runaway grep - (nf)
Message-ID: <117@hscfvax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 12-Aug-83 11:02:27 EDT
Article-I.D.: hscfvax.117
Posted: Fri Aug 12 11:02:27 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 13-Aug-83 07:08:27 EDT
Lines: 18

#N:hscfvax:400002:000:771
hscfvax!chin    Aug 12 10:52:00 1983

A most bizarre phenomonon was witnessed on our vax 11/750 running
4.1bsd last night.  It involved a runaway process in the background.
The process was shown to be "(grep)" as revealed by a "ps alx"
(by the way, what do the parentheses mean?) with no arguments.
What it was doing was taking up all the disk space on one of our
user pseudo-disk.  It was active in that any space we freed up would
*slowly* be eaten up.  The clincher is that when the process was
killed with a "kill -9 [pid]", instead of space usage stabilizing
(at 99%) it dropped dramatically back to 70% where it should be.
Does anybody know what could be happening?  It was a process probably
called by csh, but that's all we know about it.

Thanks,
Ken Chin
...!linus!genrad!wjh12!n44a!hscfvax!kchin