I thought (hoped) that grep would have the behaviour you described; but even when I use a very unlikely regular expression, perl's memory usage increases at a constant rate.

The rate doesn't appear to differ depending on what regular expression I use, which seems to imply it's not the matches (of which I doubt there are any) filling memory, but just the input from /dev/urandom (which, as you mention, is endless).

The EOL delimiter is probably \n, which should occur in /dev/urandom 1 in 256 times (so long, but not that long).

In reply to Re^4: Need to search for a string in a file by anneli
in thread Need to search for a string in a file by akrrs7

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