naftoli@aecom.UUCP (Robert N. Berlinger) (04/30/85)
If a non-root user ups his ulimit (say by "su root; ulimit 10000;
su somebody") and then adds a crontab entry, when the entry is
finally executed that user recieves a letter in the mail about
"bad ulimit" and the job fails. This is because cron implements
the preservation of ulimits by simply prepending a 'ulimit XXXX'
to the list of commands that are input to the shell. When cron
runs the job, it is run with the permissions of the non-root user
who can't up his ulimit (cron runs at the normal 2048) hence the
error message. A quick and kludgy fix would be to run cron at a
very high ulimit and therefore any change of ulimit would be in
the down direction rather than up.
--
Robert Berlinger
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