ulimit is it as bad with HPUX as I think?

[Adam Noble]

I am trying to set a ulimit value for nofiles for Oracle. In order to do this I need to increase the hard limit on the server. I've been doing a bit of reading on this and the only away I appear to be able to make this permanent is to set it in /etc/profile. This however makes this value global for all users. This seems strange to me as I do not want all users to have the same limits as oracle. Can I get around this!

[Elmar P. Kolkman]

There are multiple solutions. Easiest way is to set the ulimit in /etc/profile only if the user is oracle:
[ $(id -u) -eq ] && ulimit ...

You could of course put it in oracle's .profile, but that would mean your DBA can change it himself.

Hope this answers your question.

[Graham Cameron_1]

But be careful.
Ulimit will limit the total no of files which oracle can own, including all database files (data, control, rollback) and also any scripts, tools, utilities etc, not least of which is probably all your oracle distribution.

If you are trying to limit the number of files used by the database, then you need to change the "db_files" parameter in your init.ora (or spfile).

-- Graham