redirected output out of control

[John Kirby]

Hi BLU,

Maybe this is a newbie error and I've been lucky not to encounter it before, 
but your feedback is appreciated.

I ran a command and unintentionally created an enormous text file that ate up 
all the gigs of open space on the server:
find -print0 | xargs -0 grep -i blah > blahInstances.txt

I'm puzzled because when I ran the output to the screen, it was only something 
like 1000 lines and it quit like I expected. What's also strange to me is 
that I ran the command on my local suse 9.3 box and it didn't get caught up 
and generate a huge file. It ran as expected. Not sure exactly what OS 
version is on the machine that had the issue.

My main confusion is why running output to the screen would be fine, but 
running it to the file would get caught in a loop or something similar.

Thanks,
JK