Hands-On System Programming with Linux

API interfaces

Querying and/or setting resource limits programmatically can be achieved with the following APIs—the system calls:

• getrlimit
• setrlimit
• prlimit

Of these, we will only focus on prlimit(2); [get|set]rlimit(2) is an older interface, has quite a few issues (bugs), and is generally considered outdated.

For prlimit(2) to work properly, one must be running on Linux kernel version 2.6.36 or later.

How does one determine the Linux kernel version one is running on? Simple: use the uname utility to query the kernel version: $ uname -r 4.14.11-300.fc27.x86_64 $

Let's get back to the prlimit(2) system call API:

#include <sys/time.h>#include <sys/resource.h>int prlimit(pid_t pid, int resource,  const struct rlimit *new_limit, struct rlimit ...