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.TH "prlimit" 1 "1 September 2011" "Mark Wooding" "Toys"
.SH NAME
prlimit \- read and set processes' resource limits
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B prlimit
.B \-l
.br
.B prlimit
{
.B soft
|
.B hard
|
.B both
|
.IR resource [ \fB= value ]
|
.I pid
} ...
.SH DESCRIPTION
The
.B prlimit
program reads or sets resource limits on other processes (or itself, but
that's not usually very useful).
.PP
The command-line options available are as follows.
.TP
.B "\-h, \-\-help"
Write a full help message to standard output and exit with status zero.
.TP
.B "\-v, \-\-version"
Write
.BR prlimit 's
version number to standard output and exit with status zero.
.TP
.B "\-u, \-\-usage"
Write a short usage synopsis to standard output and exit with status
zero.
.TP
.B "\-l, \-\-list"
List the names of the recognized resource limits to standard output, one
per line, and exit with status zero.
.PP
In the absence of any options, the command line arguments are
processed.  Each argument may be one of the following.
.hP \*o
A numeric
.IR "process-id" .
The
.B prlimit
program will read and/or set resource limits on the processes whose ids
are listed on the command line.  Process-ids can be interspersed with
resource assignments and queries in any order: all of the assignments
and queries are applied to all of the processes.
.hP \*o
A
.I "resource assignment"
of the form
.IB resource = value \fR.
Sets the resource limit for the named
.I resource
to
.I value
in each of the listed processes.  The
.I value
may be
.B inf
to indicate that the named
.I resource
shouldn't be limited, or it may be a number optionally suffixed by one
of
.RB ` k ',
.RB ` M ',
.RB ` G ',
or
.RB ` T '
(case insensitive) to scale the value by successive powers of 1024.
.PP
.hP \*o
A
.I "resource query"
of the form
.IR resource .
For each listed process, a line is printed to standard output with the
following form.
.RS
.PP
\h'4n'\c
.I pid
.B soft
.IB resource = soft-limit
.B hard
.IB resource = hard-limit
.PP
showing the process's hard and soft limits in a form which can be passed
back to
.B prlimit
later to restore the process's limits to their current values.  The
.I value
is scaled and suffixed as described above if and only if this can be
done without loss of precision.
.RE
.hP \*o
One of the strings
.BR hard ,
.BR soft ,
or
.BR both .
These control whether subsequent resource assignments affect processes'
hard or soft limits:
.B both
means that both limits should be set to the same value.  The default is
to set both limits.
.SH BUGS
The
.B prlimit
program only works on Linux, because it depends on a Linux-specific
system call to do its work.
.SH SEE ALSO
.BR prlimit (2).
.SH AUTHOR
Mark Wooding, <mdw@distorted.org.uk>