Re: Bug#245678: zsh: built-in rm -rf fills up the memory

[Clint Adams <clint@zsh.org>]

> Assuming that it's the zsh/files module, the interesting thing there is
> that, because it's a depth-first traversal, it allocates zsh-heap memory
> to store all the file names in the directory, and it does so by growing
> the allocated heap block once for each filename, by the length of that
> filename (plus one).  If ZSH_MEM was not defined at compile time, doing
> this efficiently is left up to the underlying malloc() implementation [if
> I'm reading mem.c correctly] and therefore could be subject to bugs we've
> seen before where malloc never reclaims nor consolidates blocks when the
> implementation repeatedly realloc()s in slightly larger chunks.
> 
> I don't know anything about how zsh is compiled on debian or even why
> the zsh/files module would be used (seemingly) by default, but in that's
> probably the place to start looking.

Yes, sorry.  We're talking about when zsh/files is loaded explicitly.
ZSH_MEM isn't being defined.

Is there perhaps a mallopt() setting which would help?