Solaris

I have a situation where the system is dumping a 2g causing filesystem to fill up. We identified the source and working on a solution. However, I wanted to limit the size of the 'core' file.

Please examine the test scenario ...

cnewtonne@mars> ulimit -f 0
cnewtonne@mars> ls -ltr core*
core*: No such file or directory
cnewtonne@mars> gcore $$
File Size Limit Exceeded(coredump)
cnewtonne@mars>
----------------------------------------
cnewtonne@mars> ulimit -c 0
cnewtonne@mars> ulimit -a
time(seconds) unlimited
file(blocks) unlimited
data(kbytes) unlimited
stack(kbytes) 8192
coredump(blocks) 0
nofiles(descriptors) 256
vmemory(kbytes) unlimited

cnewtonne@mars> gcore $$
gcore: core.19697 dumped
cnewtonne@mars>

1) As you can see above, '-f' worked to prevent the creation of the file, whereas, '-c' did not. Why?
2) I ended up setting '-f' and '-c' to same value, however, the system still core-dumped few hours later with the same 2g file. Again, why?

Thank you.

Can you post the output of

Code:

which ulimit

Which shell are you using? ulimit is provided by the shell and there's another external program by the same name in /usr/bin

Have you tried checking the return value of "ulimit -c 0"?

This is by design.

From gcore manual page:

NOTES
gcore is unaffected by the setrlimit(2) system call using the RLIMIT_CORE value.

Is ulimit called in one of the problem process parents ?
What says

Code:

plimit <pid>

with pid being the target process id ?