Error creating thumbnail: /path/to/wiki/bin/ulimit.sh: xrealloc: ../bash/subst.c:514: cannot reallocate 512 bytes

MediaWiki's software was giving me this error, and I couldn't find a solution on google. I thought I'd post one.

I was able to fix the problem by moving the bin folder to bin.bak, downloading a new copy of mediawiki, and copying the bin folder from the new installation.

I suspect that the error occurs when you set the permissions on ulimit.sh to global read-write (777). The ulimit.sh in the new bin directory was set with limited permissions:

total 20K
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 88 Jun 5 04:18 svnstat
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 52 Jun 5 04:18 ulimit-tvf.sh
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 53 Jun 5 04:18 ulimit.sh
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 53 Jun 2 01:54 ulimit.sh.bak
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 48 Jun 5 04:18 ulimit4.sh

Correcting the error may be as easy as changing the permissions, but if that doesn't work, you can follow the steps I outlined above.