ulimit considered braindamaged ?

[Larry Campbell]

I'm finally undergoing the pain of switching from V7 to System V, and I'm
not convinced it's an improvement.  I'll confine this posting to my most
pressing complaint - ulimit.

For those fortunate enough not to have encountered System V, it has a thing
called "ulimit" which is a per-process limit on the maximum size a file can
attain.  It is inherited from your parent, and the default on my system
(Microport) is 2048 blocks, or one lousy megabyte.

What really hurts is that there appears to be NO WAY to alter this default
value.  Sure, you can change it for yourself and your children, but there
seems to be no way to globally remove the limit, or to set it to a reasonable
value.  The obvious (to me, anyway) solution would be a special type of entry
in inittab -- since init is the grandpappy of all processes, if init changes
its ulimit, all processes inherit the change.  But I sure can't find anything
in the manual about an inittab entry to set the ulimit.

Is there really no way short of patching the kernel (gag, choke) to change
the system-wide default ulimit?  Is the rest of System V as poorly thought
out as this "feature" would portend?

It's amusing to note that my SYSLOG file (on my V7 system) is now (at month's
end) over 1.2 megabytes, which wouldn't fly under System V.
-- 
Larry Campbell                                The Boston Software Works, Inc.
Internet: campbell at maynard.bsw.com          120 Fulton Street, Boston MA 02109
uucp: {alliant,wjh12}!maynard!campbell              +1 617 367 6846
ARPA: campbell%maynard.uucp at harvisr.harvard.edu      MCI: LCAMPBELL