Can using bash's globstar (**) operator cause an out of memory error? Consider something like:

for f in /**/*; do printf '%s\n' "$f"; done

When ** is being used to generate an enormous list of files, assuming the list is too large to fit in memory, will bash crash or does it have a mechanism to handle this?

I know I've run ** on humongous numbers of files and haven't noticed a problem, so I am assuming that bash will use something like temporary files to store some of the list as it is being generated. Is that correct? Can bash's ** handle an arbitrary number of files or will it fail if the file list exceeds what can fit in memory? If it won't fail, what mechanism does it use for this? Something similar to the temp files generated by sort?