bash: ulimit: core file size: cannot modify limit: Operation not permitted

Fedora 12 gcc 4.4.1

I am doing some programming, and my program gave me a stack dump.

However, there is no core file for me to examine.

So I did:

ulimit -c unlimited

and got this error message:

bash: ulimit: core file size: cannot modify limit: Operation not permitted

I also tried setting ulimit to 50000 and still got the same error.

The results of ulimit -a:

$ ulimit -a
core file size (blocks, -c) 0
data seg size (kbytes, -d) unlimited
scheduling priority (-e) 0
file size (blocks, -f) unlimited
pending signals (-i) 12275
max locked memory (kbytes, -l) 64
max memory size (kbytes, -m) unlimited
open files (-n) 1024
pipe size (512 bytes, -p) 8
POSIX message queues (bytes, -q) 819200
real-time priority (-r) 0
stack size (kbytes, -s) 10240
cpu time (seconds, -t) unlimited
max user processes (-u) 1024
virtual memory (kbytes, -v) unlimited
file locks (-x) unlimited

2 Answers

Grep for a hard limit setting in your bash initialization files. From the bash man page.

A hard limit cannot be increased once it is set; a soft limit may be increased up to the value of the hard limit.

The hard limit is set via the ulimit -H flag. It may be set in /etc/bash* or /etc/profile* files. Look for a ulimit -Hc setting.

I had this happen to me when I used dropbear as an SSH server. Apparently, dropbear sets some hard limits before spawning your shell.

Switching to OpenSSH solved the problem.