[Foxtrot] CPU limits, disk quotas and core dumps

[Alan Lawrence]

This is primarily for Matt and Sharum, but the the rest of you may find
this useful too....

Firstly, the cpu limits. I'm not sure what the limit is, but it's
something like two minutes by default. However AFAICT this is entirely
'for your own protection', against any program you run infinite looping 
etc., and you can turn it off if you so desire. (Very helpful in our
case). The command is something like 'ulimit -t unlimited', but try
'man ulimit' if that doesn't work.


Right, next point. Any program exceeding this time limit
gets shut down instantly by the kernel, the application doesn't even
receive a signal (SIGKILL etc.); instead you get dumps of the registers in
each thread, etc., and a dump of the contents of main memory.  This main
memory demp is called a 'core dump', and gets saved in a file called
'core' in the current directory. So yes, you can delete any such files you
find.

Thirdly, disk quotas. These problems are almost certainly caused by the
aforementioned core files, which are usually big (several MB). If you
delete them, you shauld magically find you have lots of disk space once
again....

HTH
Alan