uncompress and enhanced diagnostics

[Robert E. Stampfli]

In article <785 at bagend.UUCP> someone writes:
>
>   PID TTY  TIME COMMAND
> 12218  w1  3:35 uncompre
>
>About that time the notorious "no space left on device" appears, ls reveals:
>
>-rw-r--r--  1 jan     users   7022592 Jul  3 00:22 s4diag 

I have heard several people allude to compress doing this to them, and I
frankly lay no claims as to knowing why.  But, I can't understand why people
allow this to happen in the first place.  There is a shell built-in called
"ulimit" which will prevent files from growing past a certain size.  My system
is set to limit files to 1 meg and this has never caused any trouble.  I do
this in the /etc/profile (ulimit 2048).  If there is a reason to deal with
larger files this can be circumvented.  It seems like this simple step would
save a lot of hassles.

Rob Stampfli
att!cbnews!res (work)
osu-cis!n8emr!kd8wk!res (home)