du 4.1 crashes linux system

[André Somers]

Hi,

I am seeing an odd problem with my du, but I'm not sure where exactly the 
problem is: with the kernel or with du itself.

When I run du on a folder with *lots* of files (I estimate anywhere between 
200,000 to 400,000) over many subdirectories, du manages to crash my linux 
sytem. I run du as a normal user. If I look at the systemlog, there is no 
information to be found there. I would say that a normal program should not 
be able to crash the whole system, so this may be a problem with the kernel 
and not in the GNU fileutils...

My system:
Athlon XP 2000+, 512 MB RAM, 60GB + 40GB disk space, SuSE Linux 8.0, kernel 
2.4.18-SuSE
swapon -s reports:
Filename                        Type            Size    Used    Priority
/dev/hda1                       partition       771080  0       42

If you need more information, please to hessitate to ask me. I am curious to 
your opinion on this matter.

Regards,

André Somers
-- 
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant