dired-do-shell-command munches all memory

dired-do-shell-command munches all memory

[Dan Jacobson]

Want to see emacs eat all the memory, on the machine and have to be
killed? Complete with with real grinding noises.
$ touch a
$ minizip x a
creating x.zip
$ minizip x a
The file x.zip exist. Overwrite ? [y]es, [n]o : n
Then in emacs, do
(dired-do-shell-command "minizip x" nil (quote ("a")))
emacs apparently loops on the above question. Emacs version is in my headers.
$ apt-cache show zlib-bin
Filename: pool/main/z/zlib/zlib-bin_1.1.4-14_i386.deb
Description: compression library - sample programs
 Some generally useful sample programs from the contrib directory.
 Includes a "mini" implementation of `zip' and `unzip' called
 `minizip' and `miniunzip' respectively.

Re: dired-do-shell-command munches all memory

[Richard Stallman]

    $ minizip x a
    The file x.zip exist. Overwrite ? [y]es, [n]o : n

    Then in emacs, do
    (dired-do-shell-command "minizip x" nil (quote ("a")))
    emacs apparently loops on the above question. Emacs version is in my headers.

This is because minizip spews unending output.  It does that when it
hits eof on stdin while asking the yes or no question.  I think that
is a bug in minizip; can you tell me who to report that to?

Meanwhile, perhaps it is a bug in Emacs that it runs out of memory
just because a subprocess generates unending output.  The question is,
what else should it do?  Perhaps when the output gets over a certain size,
ask the user whether to continue reading it.  What do people think?