Why is this crashing
I know that not all of linux is rock solid/ready for prime time. Its understandable that certain programs or libraries just haven't seen enough use yet and still have errors hiding in the corners. Its not serious, someone needs to report these and/or fix them, but most of the time its not the end of the world. Security issues get the top priority of course, but most utilities and shell tools do not present that kind of vulnerability. Still, when it comes to utilities that have been around for more than 20 years, I sort of figure they should be pretty well tested by now.

Today I was scanning through some XML files, trying to find examples of a particular feature. Unfortunately these files had inline image data (base64), so listing the lines would be insane, and searching in VI was proving problematic as well. So I checked out grep and it has a -o flag which is just supposed to show the snipit that matches the pattern. Great, lets try it:

% grep -i -o url *
test1.xml: url
Segmentation fault

Grep crashed. Not a fluke either, was able to crash it on numerous tests. Oh for the good old days, before GNU decided they had to rewrite everything just so they could claim they wrote linux. BSD was so much more stable, or at least the features that it had, usually worked, because if they didn't, you could email the guy who wrote them and complain until he patched it to get you to shut up.  ¶ 9:00 AM