On Thu, 4 Oct 2007, Brian Buhrow wrote:

> 	Hello.  What I really want to do is change the default limit for all
> shells on the system.  Can I do this without recompiling the kernel?  Using
> sysctl seems like the obvious way to do it, but it sounds like that's not
> how it works.  So, how should I go about doing this?

Brian,

If it is for users, see login.conf(5) man page and see "datasize".

Here is an example /etc/login.conf entry:

default:datasize=1024m:

Also see master.passwd(5) manpage briefly and look at "class" field. So 
when that is empty, then the login.conf classname is "default".

  Jeremy C. Reed