Specifies the “hard” limit on file descriptors that a single process might have open. Overriding this limit requires superuser privilege.
Signed integer
65,536
1 to MAXINT
File descriptors
No
None
When the maximum number of open files for a process is not enough. Other limitations in system facilities can mean that a larger number of file descriptors is not as useful as it might be. For example:
A 32-bit program using standard I/O is limited to 256 file descriptors. A 64-bit program using standard I/O can use up to 2 billion descriptors. Specifically, standard I/O refers to the stdio(3C) functions in libc(3LIB).
select is by default limited to 1024 descriptors per fd_set. For more information, see select(3C). Starting with the Solaris 7 release, 32-bit application code can be recompiled with a larger fd_set size (less than or equal to 65,536). A 64-bit application uses an fd_set size of 65,536, which cannot be changed.
An alternative to changing this on a system wide basis is to use the plimit(1) command. If a parent process has its limits changed by plimit, all children inherit the increased limit. This alternative is useful for daemons such as inetd.
Unstable
For information, see rlim_fd_max (Solaris 8 Release).