[Pkg-zsh-devel] Bug#807836: Bug#807836: builtin unlimit leads to "xargs: invalid number for -s"

[Daniel Shahaf]

Control: retitle -1 zshbuiltins: Clarify the meaning of "hard limit" in the documentation of 'unlimit'
Control: severity -1 wishlist

Thilo Six wrote on Thu, Dec 31, 2015 at 12:19:19 +0100:
> Daniel Shahaf schrieb/wrote:
> > Thilo Six wrote on Wed, Dec 30, 2015 at 17:12:17 +0100:
> >> So as i said above, the definition of "hard limit" should be explicit in the man
> >> page, e.g.:
> >> The resource limit for each resource is set to the hard limit, that is ...
> > 
> > Maybe.  I honestly don't have an opinion — I don't find the man page
> > ambiguous in the first place ☺.
> 
> May i ask then what is a real world use case for the unlimit builtin then?
> (Just to make it clear, i am not ironic here, just interested trying to
> understand it.)

You might as well ask what's the purpose of having separate soft and
hard limits.

The hard limit is the value that even malicious or compromised user accounts
may not exceed.

I do not know what's the historical reason for having a separate soft
limit.  However, I can imagine a multiuser system with a social
expectation that if you run into the soft limit you reschedule your
resource-heavy job to off-peak hours.  Or on a desktop system, you might
selectively increase the limit for specific resource-hungry
applications, giving each application a limit of, say, 5% above its
normal usage.

Cheers,

Daniel