runaway grep - (nf)

[chin at hscfvax.UUCP]

#N:hscfvax:400002:000:771
hscfvax!chin    Aug 12 10:52:00 1983

A most bizarre phenomonon was witnessed on our vax 11/750 running
4.1bsd last night.  It involved a runaway process in the background.
The process was shown to be "(grep)" as revealed by a "ps alx"
(by the way, what do the parentheses mean?) with no arguments.
What it was doing was taking up all the disk space on one of our
user pseudo-disk.  It was active in that any space we freed up would
*slowly* be eaten up.  The clincher is that when the process was
killed with a "kill -9 [pid]", instead of space usage stabilizing
(at 99%) it dropped dramatically back to 70% where it should be.
Does anybody know what could be happening?  It was a process probably
called by csh, but that's all we know about it.

Thanks,
Ken Chin
...!linus!genrad!wjh12!n44a!hscfvax!kchin