Too many open files

Cause

A process has too many files open at once. The system imposes a per-process soft limit on open files, OPEN_MAX (usually 64), which can be increased, and a per-process hard limit (usually 1024), which cannot be increased.

Action

You can control the soft limit from the shell. In the C shell, use the limit(1) command to increase the number of descriptors. In the Bourne or Korn shells, use the ulimit -n command to increase the number of file descriptors.

If the window system refuses to start new applications because of this error, increase the open file limit in your login shell before starting the window system.

Technical Notes

The symbolic name for this error is EMFILE, errno=24.