This is quite unusual, but if a linux user has the GREP_OPTIONS set in their shell (to help highlite grep searches), it
will mess up the memory allocation routine in heap_size() (netbeans bash startup script)

The fix:
add the following to the Linux case:

export GREP_OPTIONS=

You may want to place it earlier in the script, but this worked for me. This allows the next line which tries to read
the meminfo to work, rather then get a blank value for $mem

snip-it below
...
heap_size () {
    mem=128
    case "`uname`" in
        Linux*)
--->>   export GREP_OPTIONS=
        mem=`cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemTotal | tr -d [:space:][:alpha:]:`
        mem=`expr $mem / 4096`
        ;;
    SunOS*)
        mem=`/usr/sbin/prtconf | grep Memory | /usr/xpg4/bin/tr -dc '[:digit:]'`
        mem=`expr $mem / 4`
        ;;
# Disable the heuristics on Mac until we resolve #106965
...