[File] Piping into file; will it bloat RAM?

[Arif Driessen]

Hi Christos,

thanks for the reply. This sounds like great news! But can i just confirm
my understanding, so with no changes to the default, if i pipe a 180GiB zip
file into it, at max only 7M of RAM will be allocated?

On Thu, 20 Oct 2022, 15:20 Christos Zoulas, <christos at zoulas.com> wrote:

> It will generally allocate and read only up to bytes_max which defaults to
> 7M and can be set by -P bytes=
>
> Best,
>
> christos
>
> On Oct 20, 2022, at 5:55 AM, Arif Driessen <arifd86 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
>
> I am using `file` to get the mime-type of blobs of data streamed to me. I
> open a process and a pipe, and a pass the bytes as they come to me to
> `file`. Then I close the pipe and wait for `file` to return me a mime-type.
>
>
> This works wonderfully, except, I'm worried, that file may be collecting
> into RAM the entire contents of the buffer as they are being piped.
>
> For example, if I am given an 180GiB zip file, and I keep feeding those
> bytes to the pipe, will it blow up my RAM? Or does `file` employ something
> cleverl; even if just writing to the file system, or perhaps working on
> chunks and forgetting the past?
>
> Thanks for your help!
>
> Arif Driessen
>
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