-bash: ulimit: pipe size: cannot modify limit: Invalid argument

Question

Followed the Oracle documentation to install Oracle 10g R2 on RedHat 4(UP1) x86-64 and I'm getting the following error when I login to the server from a putty client:
-bash: ulimit: pipe size: cannot modify limit: Invalid argument
Can someone explain why I'm getting this error and if there is a way to fix it?
Thanks,
Denise

Answer 1

Hi!
Just delete changes in /etc/profile and make changes as shown here in file /etc/security/limits.conf.
Read this article:
Limiting Maximum Number of Open File Descriptors for the Oracle User
After /proc/sys/fs/file-max has been changed, see Setting File Handles, there is still a per user limit of maximum open file descriptors:
$ su - oracle
$ ulimit -n
1024
$
To change this limit, edit the /etc/security/limits.conf file as root and make the following changes or add the following lines, respectively:
oracle soft nofile 4096
oracle hard nofile 63536
The "soft limit" in the first line defines the number of file handles or open files that the Oracle user will have after login. If the Oracle user gets error messages about running out of file handles, then the Oracle user can increase the number of file handles like in this example up to 63536 ("hard limit") by executing the following command:
ulimit -n 63536
You can set the "soft" and "hard" limits higher if necessary.
NOTE:
I do not recommend to set the "hard" limit for nofile for the oracle user equal to /proc/sys/fs/file-max. If you do that and the user uses up all the file handles, then the entire system will run out of file handles. This could mean that you won't be able to initiate new logins any more since the system won't be able to open any PAM modules that are required for the login process. That's why I set the hard limit to 63536 and not 65536.
That these limits work you also need to ensure that pam_limits is configured in the /etc/pam.d/system-auth file, or in /etc/pam.d/sshd for ssh, /etc/pam.d/su for su, or /etc/pam.d/login for local logins and telnet if you don't want to enable it for all login methods. Here are the two session entries I have in my /etc/pam.d/system-auth file:
session required /lib/security/$ISA/pam_limits.so
session required /lib/security/$ISA/pam_unix.so
Now login to the oracle user account since the changes will become effective for new login sessions only. Note that the ulimit options are different for other shells.
$ su - oracle
$ ulimit -n
4096
$
The default limit for oracle is now 4096 and the oracle user can increase the number of file handles up to 63536:
$ su - oracle
$ ulimit -n
4096
$ ulimit -n 63536
$ ulimit -n
63536
$
To make this change permanent, you could add "ulimit -n 63536" (for bash) to the ~oracle/.bash_profile file which is the user startup file for the bash shell on Red Hat Linux (to verify your shell execute echo $SHELL). To do this you could simply copy/paste the following commands for oracle's bash shell:
su - oracle
cat >> ~oracle/.bash_profile << EOF
ulimit -n 63536
EOF
To make the above changes permanent, you could also set the soft limit equal to the hard limit in /etc/security/limits.conf which I prefer:
oracle soft nofile 63536
oracle hard nofile 63536