Question

I have a Perl script that does various installation steps to set up a development box for our company. It runs various shell scripts, some of which crash due to lower than required ulimits (specifically, stack size -s in my case).

Therefore, I’d like to set a ulimit that would apply to all scripts (children) started from within my main Perl one, but I am not sure how to achieve that – any attempts at calling ulimit from within the script only set it on that specific child shell, which immediately exits.

I am aware that I can call ulimit before I run the Perl script or use /etc/security/limits.conf but I don’t want the user to know any of this – they should only know how to run the script, which should take care of all of that for them.

I can also run ulimit every time I run a command, like this ulimit -s BLA; ./cmd but I don’t want to duplicate this every time and I feel like there’s a better, cleaner solution out there.

Another crazy “workaround” is to make a wrapper script called BLA.sh which would set ulimit and call BLA.pl, but again, it’s a hack in my mind and now I’d have 2 scripts (I could even make BLA.pl call itself with “ulimit -s BLA; ./BLA.pl –foo” and act differently based on whether it sees –foo or not but that’s even hackier than before).

Finally, apparently I could install BSD::Resource but I’d like to avoid using external dependencies.

So what is THE way to set the ulimit from within a Perl script and make it apply to all children?

Thank you.

Answer 1

I ended up prepending ulimit -s BLA to the commands that needed it. I specifically didn’t want to go with BSD::Resource because it’s not a default Perl package and was missing on about half of the existing dev machines. No user interaction was a specific requirement.