---
id: "bug-1793"
status: "fixed"
status_updated: "2026-09-28"
status_note: ""
component: "controller"
severity: "unknown"
timestamp: "2026-09-09T16:24:19Z"
last_seen: "2026-09-19T09:00:00Z"
occurrences: 1
files: ["src/harness/join_worker_args.c"]
tags: ["controller", "testsuite", "xce_test", "cmd_join_worker", "stale-default", "units", "deferred"]
related: ["bug-1557"]
fix_commits: ["da1a663f"]
legacy: true
gitea_issue: 308
gitea_synced_status: "fixed"
gitea_synced_hash: "17b291cdcf6d"
---

# bug-1793: xce_test's worker->join command's maxswap (1024) and maxtmp (2048) defaults have the same…

## Description
xce_test's worker->join command's maxswap (1024) and maxtmp (2048) defaults have the same stale-MB-scale bug as bug-1557's maxmem -- discovered while fixing bug-1557 (xce-test-cli-ux task 2.6)

## Environment
_Not recorded (migrated from buglog.json)._

## Reproduction
_Not recorded (migrated from buglog.json)._

## Root cause
Same root cause as bug-1557: maxswap/maxtmp were reasonable defaults (1KB/2KB) back when these fields were a smaller unit, but an earlier session converted maxswap/maxtmp to bytes-canonical (confirmed via resources.yaml 'max swap/tmp disk space in bytes' and hardware_monitor.c's raw-byte sysinfo()/statvfs() computations) without updating this test-tool default. 1024 bytes of swap / 2048 bytes of tmp are just as nonsensical as the old maxmem=64 bytes.

## Fix
join's maxswap/maxtmp defaults are now 1 GiB / 2 GiB in bytes (the intended 1024/2048 MB), help text and example updated to bytes; -m/-s/-t are parsed with strtod() and validated, since atoi() overflowed above 2 GB.

## Verification
- Test: test_join_worker_swap_tmp_defaults_are_bytes, test_join_worker_byte_values_above_int_range and test_join_worker_non_numeric_byte_value_rejected in src/harness/testsuite/test_join_worker_args.c: all three RED against the old join_worker_args.c (maxswap 1024; 8 GB parsed as 0; 'lots' accepted), GREEN after
- Suites: harness 6/6 (asan): harness_unit_test 141/0, cmdutil 14/0, resval_typeresolve 7/0, joblist_display 22/0, join_worker_args 7/0, listrow_json 12/0
- Live: n/a; xce_test is a client tool and every case above runs without a controller

## References
- Related: bug-1557