MAX FILES PER PROCESS PROBLEM

[Christopher Herot]

Rick Thomas's suggestion is precisely the kind or haughty arrogance
that gives programmers a bad name.  Such arbitrary restrictions are
often the cause of MORE complicated programs, since the programmer
must invent write-arounds to get the system to work.

As one example of why 20 not very large, consider a program which
has to drive 3 graphics displays, 3 touch screens, one data tablet,
one digitiser, a sound box, and an ascii terminal.  Now add a file for
error logging, and a few pipes to other processes and you don't have
very many left over for the actual disc files the program may need
to access.  As a result, the programmer may be prevented from using
simple and elegant schemes such as storing one relation from his database
in one Unix file.  Instead he must invent a more complex scheme to
store multiple relations in one file, or write a program to open
and close files in order to conserve the precious descriptors.

~v