Manual Pages  — ULIMIT

ulimit – get and set process limits

LIBRARY SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION RETURN VALUES ERRORS SEE ALSO STANDARDS HISTORY BUGS

Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

#include <ulimit.h>

long
ulimit(int cmd, ...);

The ulimit() function will get and set process limits. Currently this is limited to the maximum file size. The cmd argument is one of the following:

UL_GETFSIZE
	will return the maximum file size in units of 512 blocks of the current process.
UL_SETFSIZE
	will attempt to set the maximum file size of the current process and its children with the second argument expressed as a long.

Upon successful completion, ulimit() returns the value requested; otherwise the value -1 is returned and the global variable errno is set to indicate the error.

The ulimit() function will fail if:

[EINVAL]
	The command specified was invalid.
[EPERM]
	The limit specified to ulimit() would have raised the maximum limit value, and the caller is not the super-user.

The ulimit() function conforms to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 ("POSIX.1").

The ulimit() function first appeared in FreeBSD 5.0 .