I was messing around with my system and found a novel way to use up memory, but it seems that the less command only holds a limited amount of data before stopping/killing the command. To test, run (careful! uses lots of system memory very fast!) $ cat /dev/zero | less From my testing, it looks like the command is killed after less reaches 2.5 gigabytes of memory, but I can't find anything in the man page that suggests that it would limit it in such a way. In addition, I couldn't find any documentation via the google on the subject. Any light to this quite surprising discovery would be great! System Information: Quad core intel i7, 8gb ram. $ uname -a Linux Tyler-Work 3.13.0-32-generic #57-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jul 15 03:51:08 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux $ less --version less 458 (GNU regular expressions) Copyright (C) 1984-2012 Mark Nudelman less comes with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. For information about the terms of redistribution, see the file named README in the less distribution. Homepage: http://www.greenwoodsoftware.com/less $ lsb_release -a No LSB modules are available. Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Release: 14.04 Codename: trusty