[ruby-talk:14684] bizarre eval resource problem solved

(sorry, I should have continued the previous thread I started, but my 
ISP's newsserver crashed or something, so I don't have it).

Anyway, In a prior post today I mentioned that I was using eval in a file 
search and that if I repeatedly did this on a large file I eventually ran 
out of resources.  Soooo....  I added the magic GC.start like so:
##########################################################
i = 0
failed = true
found  = false
while true do
   i += 1
   puts i
         rptFile = "CYPsw00695.rpt"
         srchStr = "!(/Error Count = [1-9]/ || /Abort/ || /[1-9] error/ || 
/fatal/)"
         rpt_h = File.open rptFile
         puts "after File.open #{rptFile}" if $DEBUG
         puts "srchStr is: #{srchStr}" if $DEBUG
         while rpt_h.gets do
           #puts "while: #$_" if $DEBUG

           if eval srchStr
              failed = false
              found  = true
              #puts "FOUND: #$_" if $DEBUG
           else
              failed = true
              puts "FAILED : #$_" if $DEBUG
              break
           end  #if eval
         GC.start #<=== this solved the problem
         end
         rpt_h.close
end                          

#######################################################

Apparently, the regex's in the srchStr create regex objects during the 
eval and those regex objects take a while to get cleared out by garbage 
collection and since there are many thousands of lines in the file being 
checked, the eval happens thousands of times (once on each line).  It may 
be that on a larger file, I may need to do the GC.start after some number 
of lines in order to avoid running out of space.


Phil