diff --git a/Lib/test/regrtest.py b/Lib/test/regrtest.py
index 1590ab1e842..ffb49ab7386 100755
--- a/Lib/test/regrtest.py
+++ b/Lib/test/regrtest.py
@@ -83,6 +83,22 @@ if sys.maxint > 0x7fffffff:
     warnings.filterwarnings("ignore", "hex/oct constants", FutureWarning,
                             "<string>")
 
+# MacOSX (a.k.a. Darwin) has a default stack size that is too small
+# for deeply recursive regular expressions.  We see this as crashes in
+# the Python test suite when running test_re.py and test_sre.py.  The
+# fix is to set the stack limit to 2048.
+# This approach may also be useful for other Unixy platforms that
+# suffer from small default stack limits.
+if sys.platform == 'darwin':
+    try:
+        import resource
+    except ImportError:
+        pass
+    else:
+        soft, hard = resource.getrlimit(resource.RLIMIT_STACK)
+        newsoft = min(hard, max(soft, 1024*2048))
+        resource.setrlimit(resource.RLIMIT_STACK, (newsoft, hard))
+
 from test import test_support
 
 RESOURCE_NAMES = ('curses', 'largefile', 'network', 'bsddb')