ulimit considered braindamaged ?

Monte Pickard monte at oblio.UUCP
Tue Jan 6 17:04:33 AEST 1987


In article <10943 at sun.uucp>, guy%gorodish at Sun.COM (Guy Harris) writes:
> > You can change the system-wide default value for ulimit by, assuming of
> > course that you have a source code license, changing a constant ....
> 
> Nothing so straightforward; it's called CDLIMIT.
> 
> One hopes that in S5R3 they've at least come to their senses to the extent
> of making it a constant tunable without source (one *could* hope they
> realize that the "ulimit" scheme is the wrong solution, implement quotas
> instead, and either crank the default ulimit up to 2^31-1 or set it to 0 and
> have that mean "no limit").

System V, Release 3 still has CDLIMIT as a 'source code' based parameter.
But, most vendors porting UNIX since Version 7, brought this out to their
configuration step provided to all users at the administration level.  So
any site could, if so desired, with binary license, change this value.  The
other 'psuedo getty' solutions work in the other cases.

To declare this approach in terms like "...come to their senses..." and 
"...is the wrong solution...", on the other hand seems a bit arrogant.  
Possibly 'a better way...', but wrong?  Wording of a response can 
make it so much more acceptable and more pleasant to read.

Monte Pickard - Counterpoint Computers



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