ulimit considered braindamaged ?

[Paul Sutcliffe Jr.]

In article <790 at maynard.BSW.COM>, campbell at maynard.BSW.COM (Larry Campbell) writes:
> [ complaining(?) about ulimit ]
> 
> What really hurts is that there appears to be NO WAY to alter this default
> value.  Sure, you can change it for yourself and your children, but there
> seems to be no way to globally remove the limit, or to set it to a reasonable
> value.  The obvious (to me, anyway) solution would be a special type of entry
> in inittab -- since init is the grandpappy of all processes, if init changes
> its ulimit, all processes inherit the change.  But I sure can't find anything
> in the manual about an inittab entry to set the ulimit.

The problem here is that ulimit is a builtin to the Bourne shell (the
csh does not know about ulimit, but does honor the default).  At a place
I work that used to sell Onyx, we did put a line similar to this in the
inittab file:

	2:02:/usr/bin/ulimit 8192 /etc/getty 5 tty02

(Onyx used System III, so the inittab syntax is a little different
from SysV).  This required an "external" program to set ulimit.  When
we encountered the same problem you're having with XENIX V, I wrote a
ulimit program that did the same actions as the Onyx one.  XENIX does
not have an inittab, so I implemented it differently, but it does
work.  If anyone is interesed in the code, send me mail.  If I get
enough requests, I post the source to net.sources (mod.sources if I
get around to creating a man page!).

> It's amusing to note that my SYSLOG file (on my V7 system) is now (at month's
> end) over 1.2 megabytes, which wouldn't fly under System V.

It's also interesting to note that _any_ process running as set[e]uid
root does not adhere to the ulimit value (e.g. can write to any size
file).  

-paul

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