ulimit (was: getty/login for callback)
Terry Hull
terry at eecea.eece.ksu.edu
Tue Apr 18 08:40:44 AEST 1989
In article <19516 at genrad.UUCP> jpn at genrad.genrad.COM (John P. Nelson) writes:
>
>Excuse me, perhaps I'm slow. But could someone please explain to me
>just what the PURPOSE of "ulimit" is? What are it's GOOD points?
It is designed to keep processes from accidentally filling up file
systems. Here is an example: I write a program that does a few
calculations and writes the results to a disk file. The program is
supposed to terminate after 100 iterations, but I forget to increment
the counter on the way through the loop. The program ends up going
through 1,000,000 iterations. I do not even notice because I am
running the process in the background. With no ulimit, I can fill
up a file system totally by accident.
In general, a quota system does not keep users from filling up file
systems either. We have a VAX 11/750 running VMS with quotas. We
have approximately 3X more disk space allocated to users than we have
on the machine!!!!
--
Terry Hull
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Kansas State University
Work: terry at eecea.eece.ksu.edu, rutgers!ksuvax1!eecea!terry
Play: tah386!terry at eecea.eece.ksu.edu, rutgers!ksuvax1!eecea!tah386!terry
More information about the Comp.bugs.sys5
mailing list