From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0) Non-root user unable to use ulimit to raise the maximum number of open file descriptors. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. The file /etc/rc.d/rc.local contains the lines at the end: echo 128000 > /proc/sys/fs/inode-max echo 64000 > /proc/sys/fs/file-max 2. As root: type ulimit -n 32000 3. As root, "ulimit -a" command shows last command was succcessful. 4. As normal user: type "ulimit -n 5000" 5. receive error message: "bash: ulimit: cannot modify limit: Operation not permitted" Actual Results: Non root user cannot increase number of open files they are allowed to have Expected Results: Want to increase number of open files for one of my non- root users
Unprivileged uses are not allowed to increase their limits. (If they could, there would be little point in setting them in the first place.) This is a policy enforced by the kernel. See the setrlimit(2) man page for more information.