🚀 go-pugleaf

I am curious why some shells have limits on certain resources.  For instance,
ksh potentially has he following hard and soft limits:

	  The number of blocks of core dump size.
	  The number of bytes of size of the data area.
	  The number of blocks of files written by child processes.
	  The number of bytes of size of physical memory.
	  The number of file descriptors.
	  The number of blocks for pipe buffering.
	  The number of bytes of size of the stack area.
	  The number of seconds to be used by each process.
	  The number of bytes for virtual memory.

I suppose I understand why one would not want any of a core dump written -
though I don't know why one would only want PART of a core dump written.
I assume the limits on data area, physical memory, pipe buffering, stack
area and virtual memory is to keep something from looking with malloc or
skipping garbage collection, etc. and eating up all of memory?  Number
of seconds used by each process would be good to limit to keep a process
from looping till the cows come home.

What benefits are there in limiting the number of file descriptors?  And
what harm would be caused if the soft limit were just automatically set to
the hard limit size?
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Larry W. Virden                 UUCP: osu-cis!chemabs!lvirden
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