topic ulimit in Operating System - HP-UX

ulimit

joyce k. yung — Mon, 08 May 2000 17:31:12 GMT

I have a T600/9000 running 10:20. It supported a customed application which in couple of its script has included "ulimit 4194303". Well, the vendor is long gone now and the application is running fine but my users will often getting an e-mail saying somthing like:

sh[34]: ulimit: The specified value exceeds the user's allowable limit.

When I type "ulimit" at the command line and it return "unlimited".

My questions are:

1) what is the command "ulimit" really do and
2) if it said the the specified value (I guess is 4194303) excedds the user's allowable limit then what is the user's allowable limit?

Thank you so much for your help. God bless.

Joyce

Re: ulimit

Steve White_1 — Mon, 08 May 2000 19:11:00 GMT

Hi,

The reply from ulimit that you received was that the client is capable of creating a file up to 2 GB in size. You may want to try ulimit -a, this will give you more details on what the client can do.

The -a option shows

maxdsiz
maxssiz
memory

Re: ulimit

Jason Luginbuhl — Thu, 11 May 2000 14:08:27 GMT

The functionality is of ulimit is shell dependent.

POSIX shell (/usr/bin/sh):
Use ulimit -a to display all ulimit parameters. The first letter of each of parameter is the option that you use to change the limit of that parameter. For example for "file(blocks)" make this unlimited by:
ulimit -f unlimited

K-shell (usr/bin/ksh):
Ulimit for ksh only refers to filesize. There is no "unlimited" value, although the maximum value of 4194304 is interpreted as unlimited. To change it:
ulimit 4194304

C-Shell (/usr/bin/csh)
Ulimit is not used. Instead "limit" is used and it has much the same functionality as the POSIX version of ulimit.