Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!lll-lcc!ames!oliveb!sun!gorodish!guy From: guy%gorodish@Sun.COM (Guy Harris) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: ulimit considered braindamaged ? Message-ID: <11012@sun.uucp> Date: Tue, 6-Jan-87 14:41:11 EST Article-I.D.: sun.11012 Posted: Tue Jan 6 14:41:11 1987 Date-Received: Tue, 6-Jan-87 23:40:49 EST References: <790@maynard.BSW.COM> <166@herman.UUCP> <10943@sun.uucp> <372@oblio.UUCP> Sender: news@sun.uucp Lines: 30 Keywords: ulimit SysV irksome Summary: "ulimit" *is* wrong, and making it default to 1MB with no convenient way of configuring it is even more wrong! > To declare this approach in terms like "...come to their senses..." and > "...is the wrong solution...", on the other hand seems a bit arrogant. The arrogance here is AT&T-IS's, not mine; by hardwiring the limit to 1MB or so (count your blessings - at least it's a #define constant; in S3 it was a hardwired 1L<<11!) and providing no way of changing this without hackery, they declared that nobody should ever want to create files larger than 1MB unless they're running as "root" or want to go through that hackery. Sticking this into the kernel without making it a configurable parameter *is* senseless; the complaints that surface periodically on the net about this should be sufficient evidence of that. > Possibly 'a better way...', but wrong? Wording of a response can > make it so much more acceptable and more pleasant to read. Yes, *wrong*. If some people find it unacceptable to state that, that's their problem. If the intent is to limit people's usage of disk space, "ulimit" doesn't succeed in many cases. Individual users are quite likely to have lots of small files, and "ulimit" does nothing about that. Disk quota mechanisms can control that. If the intent is to control runaway programs, it should be user-controllable and should default to "infinity", not 1MB. There's no reason whatsoever to penalize database programs and the like, as they often have quite legitimate reasons to have files larger than 1MB. 4BSD has a mechanism which is almost identical (it also sends a signal if you exceed the file size limit, and also provides limits for other resources such as CPU time), but the kernel doesn't set "init"s file size limit to 1MB.