On a Fedora 7 I have set following limits (only) on /etc/security/limits.conf: * soft core 0 * hard core 32768 When I use tcsh I get this: % limit -h core coredumpsize 32768 kbytes But with zsh I get this: $ ulimit -Hc 65536 Reading the standards below it seems unambiguous that the correct block size should be 512: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/utilities/ulimit.html http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/ulimit.html FWIW, zsh and ksh are using 512 and bash and tcsh are using 1024. I think tcsh should be fixed. A similar bug against Bash is Bug 314461.
Actually, when reading /etc/security/limits.conf it says: #<item> can be one of the following: # - core - limits the core file size (KB) So tcsh is working correctly here, only bash is incorrect here. Please close this one.