SIGSERV on rm /var/tmp/*

[Asya]

Hi,

I'm getting the following weird error:

# rm /var/tmp/*

Pid 20421 received a SIGSEGV for stack growth failure.
Possible causes: insufficient memory or swap space,
or stack size exceeded maxssiz.
Memory fault

and it kicks me out of the shell.

# kmtune |grep maxssiz
maxssiz 0x00800000
maxssiz_64bit 0x00800000
# swapinfo
Kb Kb Kb PCT START/ Kb
TYPE AVAIL USED FREE USED LIMIT RESERVE PRI NAME
dev 8388608 0 8388608 0% 0 - 1 /dev/vg00/lvol2
reserve - 1027092 -1027092
memory 13201768 8898592 4303176 67%

Memory: 124336K (10408K) real, 935368K (9928K) virtual, 6101180K free Page# 1/4


everything seems in place. What could be causing it? I can rm single files and even a batch of them using regular expressions. Why can't remove all of them at once?

Thank you,
Asya

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Your maxssiz is only 8MB (the default); this is considered too small. Increase it to about 32MB or 64MB (very generous); you also need to increse it's 64-bit cousin to at least as large as the 32-bit maxssiz because the maxssiz cannot be greater than maxssiz_64bit.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

You can also work around the size of the argument list supplied to the rm command by doing something like
rm /var/tmp/[a-f]*
rm /var/tmp/[g-l]*
...

[Biswajit Tripathy]

Just curious, how many files are there in /var/tmp
directory?

- Biswajit

[Asya]

Thank you for your help.
Increasing maxssiz fixed the problem.