Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4054 mails)

[Randall R Schulz <rschulz@xxxxxxxxx>]

Corvin,

On Monday 16 January 2006 10:40, Corvin Russell wrote:
> Yes, it is, reiserfs on SuSE 9.3 Also, in case anyone
> suggests it, it's not a bash limit. ulimit -a shows
> unlimited for file size.

In the interest of factual clarity, the numbers controlled and reported 
by the ulimit command (and analogous commands built into other shells) 
are not "bash limit[s]" or limits imposed by any shell. Rather, the 
kernel imposes these limits. The shell is only involved because as with 
other process-scoped values such as current directory, environment 
variables or user and group IDs, these values are inherited upon 
fork()-ing a new process or exec()-ing a new program. They never 
propagate "back" or "out" from a sub-process to the process that 
invoked the sub-process. This means commands that control such 
parameters must be implemented by the shell, lest their effect cease to 
exist upon termination of the separately executed process that put them 
into effect.


> Corvin


Randall Schulz