ls --width happily eats all memory

[Sakari Lehtonen]

I dont know if this is a bug but it totally stalled my machine.
I tried out ls --width=600000 and it began allocating memory to the point
where the Linux kernel started to kill other processes to free more 
memory and eventually killing ls. Maybe it is not very useful to be able to 
specify a line width of 600000 ? 

My system is a GNU/Linux 2.2.17 Debian Woody on an i586 with glibc 2.2 
and ls (GNU fileutils) 4.0.31.

-- 
 Sakari Lehtonen (address@hidden)