Affinities and ulimit

The Bash ulimit built-in can be used to probe and set the current user limits. Such limits include the amount of memory a process may use or the maximum number of opened files a user can have. While ulimit is generally understood to affect a whole session, it can be used to change the limits of a group of processes using, for example, a sub-shell.

However, the ulimit command is quirky (it expects a particular order for parameters and not all may be set on the same command line) and does not seems to be ageing all that well. For one thing, one cannot set the affinity of processes—indirectly controlling the number of and which cores one can use in a multi-core machine.