[markoman]

I tried your strace commands on my linux desktop and I don't get anything like your results. I get a few lines of 'read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1...' type stuff. Are you using bash (as I am) or some other shell? Could there be some escaping that I'm missing? Thanks.

[jsnell]

It's reading from a file named foo, which in this case was 4GB large and created with:

  dd if=/dev/zero of=foo bs=1024 count=$((1024*1024*4))

You probably don't have a file of that name in the current working directory?

[markoman]

I missed that, thanks.