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

[Daniel Shahaf]

Thilo Six wrote on Sat, Jan 02, 2016 at 20:28:39 +0100:
> 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).
....
> Now if unlimit would instead evaluate the maximum physical possible size for
> that limit and activate that, i would say nice.

Managing system resources is the OS's job, not zsh's.  I suggest you
look into configuring your OS to set the hard limit as a function of the
available hardware.  Then, calling 'unlimit' in zsh will behave as you
expect (without any code changes to zsh or to your zsh script).

> 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?
> 

The stack contains function call frames.  The input to the shell would
be allocated on the heap, not on the stack.  Hence, it would be affected
by the memory allocation limits, not by the stack size limits.

Cheers,

Daniel