limiting resources

[Tom Haapanen]

Reinhard Doelz <doelz at urz.unibas.ch> writes:
> 1) disk space of users might be limited by setting more than the default 
>    partitions, e.g., create new partitions and put each group of users on 
>    one of them. Once a device is full, there is no way to write on the device 
>    any longer. I did that , and esp. the /tmp device proved to be useful.
>    Once /tmp is on the normal file system (/), it is easy to hang the entire
>    system by calling vi on a 40 MByte ascii fie etc.

Well, we have /tmp on a separate partition (the root partition) with normally
about 8.5 MB of free space.  But the downside of this is that I can not vi
a one-megabyte ascii file!  The temp file would be about 9 MB, I think!

Does anyone know why vi creates such monster temp files?  Can't this be
fixed (by someone who has source)?

                                        \tom haapanen
"now, you didn't really expect          tom at mims-iris.waterloo.edu
 my views to have anything to do        watmims research group
 with my employer's, did you?"          university of waterloo