• Antelope Release 5.10 Linux CentOS release 7.6.1810 (Core) 3.10.0 2020-05-12

 

NAME

check_file_descriptors - check limits on file descriptors on Mac machines

SYNOPSIS

check_file_descriptors [-v]

DESCRIPTION

Mac OS X places some hard limits on the total number of file descriptors open at once by one user. This limit is managed separately from the shell "unlimit descriptors", and has to be changed manually by root, preferably by editing (or creating) /etc/launchd.conf.

The number of open files is likely to be larger than you expect, because each process probably has a number of dynamic libraries open, in addition to files which it opened explicitly.

It is quite painful to run out of file descriptors: you cannot start any new processes, the behavior of standard utilities like terminal and tcsh seem erratic, and Antelope programs have varied behavior. If you happen to be logged out, you may not be able to get logged in.

The best thing is to avoid this situation altogether. check_file_descriptors is run periodically by rtexec to watch for the problem, but you can also run it directly.

OPTIONS

EXAMPLE

% check_file_descriptors -v
3968 fds open of 10000 maximum leaving 6032 available
 927 cdorb2db
 191 Mail
 178 WebProces
 126 tcsh
 102 iTunes
  97 Dropbox
  95 Instrumen
  94 perl
  91 Dashboard
  91 launchd
   .
   .
   .

RETURN VALUES

Always zero.

SEE ALSO

lsof(8)

AUTHOR

Daniel Quinlan
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