[Bug 82123] Re: bash is not freeing memory of backticked output

[George Pollard]

Just ran into this. I think it should be considered a bug.

Bash is currently holding onto 4.8 GiB of my memory, and when I try to
run less or top it just states "bash: fork: Cannot allocate memory".

Running a large for-loop should not make bash hold onto this much memory
for its whole session.

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Title:
  bash is not freeing memory of backticked output

Status in Bourne Again Shell:
  Invalid
Status in “bash” package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: bash

  
  In feisty, when a command is called with backtick, there is apparently a memory leak which is fixed only once the correspong bash session is closed.

  How to reproduce:
  1. for i in `seq 1 100000` ; do true ; done
      in a bash session (even gnome-terminal would do)
      You can see the memory increasing, repeat this few times to observe that it is actually
      increasing and not getting freed.

  On the other hand 
    for i in $(seq 1 100000) ; do true; done

  works fine.

  My system is Feisty (upgraded from edgy, which was upgraded from
  dapper, from breezy)

  --Arnold

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