CPIO ulimit reached error

Question

I have been googling this without much luck. I hope someone can help here.

We have a customer running SCO Unixware 7 machine. This machine does a daily backup to tape. These have stopped running. It goes through and gets into the /home directory and produces the following error

UX:cpio: HALT: ulimit reached for output file.

This runs out of the root crontab and the ulimit settings for root is this

# ulimit -a
time(seconds) unlimited
file(blocks) unlimited
data(kbytes) unlimited
stack(kbytes) 16384
coredump(blocks) 32768
nofiles(descriptors) 256
memory(kbytes) unlimited

I am unsure what all of the sudden has caused this to stop working. What can I do to help alleviate this issue?

Current Crontab entry

0 23 * * 1-6 /tech/mn/autobackup.sh

Suggested Crontab entry

0 23 * * 1-6 ulimit -f unlimited; sh /tech/mn/autobackup.sh

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 07 '15 at 01:53

0

The ulimits for a root login are not necessarily the same as the ulimits in the cron-spawned cpio. Run ulimit -Sa and ulimit -Ha from the root crontab to find out what the limits inherited by cron jobs are.

Some Unixes have a convenient/exasperating feature where they will configurably apply limits to sessions on session creation, for example in /etc/login.conf.

My approach would be to insert ulimit -f unlimited; on the crontab line before the real command.

answered Aug 07 '15 at 01:53

aecolley

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I added the current and the suggested crontab to the OP. Is that how you where recommending I try it? – Deldran Aug 07 '15 at 14:57
Yes, though the extra `sh` after the `;` is unnecessary. – aecolley Aug 07 '15 at 15:01
ok i will give it a try and see what happens – Deldran Aug 07 '15 at 15:30
So I tried adding that to cron. the backup still failed. Any other ideas? – Deldran Aug 11 '15 at 14:51
Well, the error message clearly refers to the file ulimit. Either it's wrong, or the ulimit is being set inside the `autobackup.sh` script somewhere. – aecolley Aug 11 '15 at 15:42

CPIO ulimit reached error

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