grep line length limit

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi Friends,

I am having a funny problem with grep. When I run
grep 'expr' file.txt
things work fine. But when try to get the line number using the -n option, i.e,
grep -n 'expr' file.txt
I get a message, "grep: 0652-226 Maximum line length of 2048 exceeded."

If the line has more than 2048 characters, then I should have got the error in the first case also. Can somebody please explain why the error is only with the -n option? I am running on AIX 5.1.0.0

Thanks.

2

As a guess - the line length is 2045. When grep attempts to write the line number
plus the original line, then the 2048 limit for I/O is exceeded.

Edit -
I cannot duplicate this problem, the line size limit is not the same.

3

That's where you do not have control...over the tools you use.
If you have Python in your AIX already:

for linenum, lines in enumerate(open("file.txt")):
     if "expr" in lines:
          print "Line number: " , linenum
4

Thanks Jim. That might be the cause.