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I had the same issue with the error as this and this question (both of which I read and understood), the message being:

$ ulimit -n 20000
ulimit: bad limit: Operation not permitted

I encountered this issue on FreeBSD 8.3 after an upgrade from 7.3 and thought it may have had something to do with the upgrade.

I also had all sorts of issues running the command as root and could only run it as a standard user - which is what I wanted in any case.

The issue is that with FreeBSD the command is limit, not ulimit.

When I ran as a normal user:

%limits -n 20000

I got the exact result I wanted which was to increase the openfile limit from 11095 to 20000, or so I thought.

The output was:

Resource limits (current):
  openfiles               20000

However when I ran the limit command again the limit is shown back at 11095.

How do I change either the hard/soft limit on a FreeBSD 8.3 box?

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Deesbek
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    `limit` is the command in csh and tcsh. `ulimit` is the command in other shells. `limits` will either run a command with modified limits, or give you an appropriate set of commands to `eval` in your shell to set limits. You probably want `eval \`limits -e -S -n 20000\`` – Mark Plotnick Apr 25 '14 at 01:59
  • Thanks for that @MarkPlotnick however when I run `# eval `limits -e -S -n 20000` ulimit: Command not found.` I get that answer as root, and as a normal user, `eval `limits -e -S -n 20000` ulimit: bad limit: Operation not permitted` – Deesbek Apr 25 '14 at 02:42
  • Looks like, when you're root using csh, `limits` is guessing the wrong shell to output commands for. Try running `limit` directly: `# limit desc 20000` . In your normal-user example, `limits` is working correctly but `ulimit` is unable to raise the limit higher than the hard limit. You need to raise the hard limit for that normal user first, either by editing config files and logging in as that user again, or by running `limit -h desc 20000` as root and then using `su` to become the user. – Mark Plotnick Apr 25 '14 at 14:48

1 Answers1

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There is an overall limit set by the sysctl kern.maxfilesperproc.

To change this, edit /etc/sysctl.conf to include something like: 

kern.maxfilesperproc=yourchosenvalue

Then do service sysctl restart

You may have to log in again, or reboot, to see the new maximum.

Bob Eager
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