I think that what's happening to you is that your command is missing -e EXPR. Without EXPR, the command will start to run and forget to finish, slowing things down until the whole computer grinds to a halt.

The trick to zgrep is that it really isn't very portable. For example, the -d option isn't supported by my system's grep. Here's what I used that worked: 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $file = shift @ARGV;

open(INFILE, "|-", "zgrep -c -e / $file ") or die $!;
close INFILE;

[download]
You'll notice that I used "|-": it writes to STDOUT, which is what I think that you were trying to do. I also tried it with "-|": it writes to STDIN, and that didn't work.

In reply to Re: Out of Memory by Khen1950fx
in thread Out of Memory by soubalaji

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