rlimit, Resource Limit

rlimit is process-based. rlimit establishes a restricting boundary on the consumption of a variety of system resources by a process. Each process that the process creates inherits from the original process. A resource limit is defined by a pair of values. The values specify the current (soft) limit and the maximum (hard) limit.

A process might irreversibly lower its hard limit to any value that is greater than or equal to the soft limit. Only a process with superuser ID can raise the hard limit. See setrlimit() and getrlimit().

The rlimit structure contains two members that define the soft limit and hard limit.

rlim_t     rlim_cur;       /* current (soft) limit */
rlim_t     rlim_max        /* hard limit */