> 	Maybe it could call getrlimit and base the size of the limited
> 	buffer on that (1/8th?)

Ugh. These are all cheesy heuristics.

It would be much better if there was a simple system-specific enhancement
requiring HAVE_MMAP, where it picks an address way out in the process space
somewhere and starts mmap-ing the growable buffer there. When it needs to
grow the buffer, it just mmap's some more memory on the end of it.

This is just using sparse addressing to get the benefits of segments...

Admittedly I didn't follow this entire thread, so I'm assuming grep really
needs all that memory, and we should let it mmap away until it hits an rlimit.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com