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

[Thilo Six]

Hello Daniel,

Daniel Shahaf schrieb/wrote:

>> 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.

Now we are back were this bug started.
I do not argue soft vs. hard limit or their existence at all. They are useful.
I do not even argue that temporarily lifting current limits upwards is useful.

I do argue (and that is what has caused this bug) that setting a limit that far
beyond anything capable on this current system that it is not even technical
able to handle that size of such a limit is useful.
And that is just what unlimit does (at least that is what i gather from this
bugs history).

After unlimit has been run the max input size is set to a that large integer
that i would need to go and buy a rather professional SAN System to back that
setting up with actually s.th. capable for it.
And just that is what i simply do not understand, as that behaviour of unlimit
is the opposite of being useful in real world.

Now if unlimit would instead evaluate the maximum physical possible size for
that limit and activate that, i would say nice.
As in your example that would be as pushing the super-turbo-charger button for
current session. And actually that is what i had expected when using it.

question:
Something i was not be able to 100% verify up to now, but i guess from what i
read so far that input size on shell prompt relates to stack size in terms of
rlimit?

After all if nothing else this bug has served my self for learning quite a bit
so far. At least i do count that as "worth it".

Again thanks for your input. It is appreciated.



kind regards,

     Thilo