[OS X] 'too many open files' error on open

[cbertozzi]

OS X binary raise this exception when opening on 10.10.5 (Yosemite):

starting version 1.1
2016/08/01 09:13:28 too many open files

[EdMcBane]

Hi @cbertozzi , and thanks for the report.
This is a known issue on OS X, due to a limitation of the golang filesystem notification library used.
Even though OS X has a fully recursive notification facility, fsnotify falls back to monitoring each and every directory separately, and easily crashes against the maximum number of file descriptors limit, which is relatively low on OS X.

You can see the maximum number of allowed open files by running:

ulimit -a

You can try to work around this problem by raising it, but you'll be limited by the OS hard limit, which you can check with:

sysctl kern.maxfilesperproc
sysctl kern.maxfiles

Reaching the hard limit can break things, so be careful.
If you want to go ahead anyway and raise it, you can do it with e.g.:

ulimit -n 4096

Mind that this won't make it permanent, you'll need to put it in your ~/.profile or run it again in every shell before running digit.

[EdMcBane]

Leaving this open since a proper solution is possible.