about /usr/etc/chill

[hobbit () bronze lcs mit edu (*Hobbit*)]

Cool -- every time I've looked for a manpage on "chill", it hasn't been
there.  [Hey Pete, where'd you come across it?]

It's hard to believe that that's all it does.  A long time ago I wrote a thing
that just sbrk()s until it can't anymore, and starts scrolling through the
memory it grabbed to beat the shit out of the pager.  It has the side effect
of snarfing up all the other process' unlocked pages, and they all go back
into the free list when I exit the thing.  I.e. the exact same results as
running chill.

Unfortunately the only way to limit its scope is to do "limit datasize
some-number" in the csh before running it, or it brings the system to
its knees, and it certainly doesn't need any special kmem access to run!

But why would you want to do this at all, other than to masturbate the
memory management?

_H*