I routinely operate on machines with gigabytes of memory, but rarely write pipelines which output gigabytes of data, so this has never been a concern for me. Bu

I routinely operate on machines with gigabytes of memory, but rarely write pipelines which output gigabytes of data, so this has never been a concern for me. But even then, there’s still swap space which is effectively like using a temp file but lazier. By the way, I think you’d be in even more trouble if you wrote: cat /dev/zero > a