Special Edition Using® Solaris™ 9

Restricting the File Size and Disk Space Usage

Some applications and processes create temporary files that occupy a lot of hard disk space. As a result, it is necessary to impose a restriction on the size of the files that are created.

Solaris provides tools to control the storage. They are:

• The ulimit command

• Disk quotas

ulimit Command

The ulimit command is a built-in shell command, which displays the current file size limit. The default value for the maximum file size, set inside the kernel, is 1500 blocks. The following syntax displays the current limit:

$ ulimit -a
time(seconds) unlimited
file(blocks) unlimited
data(kbytes) unlimited
stack(kbytes) 8192
coredump(blocks) unlimited
nofiles(descriptors) 256
memory(kbytes) unlimited

If the limit ...