Re: tar limitations?

["Scott M. Stone" <sstone@example.com>]

On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Tod McQuillin wrote:

> On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> 
> > >>>>> "Hector" == Hector Akamine <akamine@example.com> writes:
> >
> >     Hector> but when the size of the file becomes about 2GB
> >
> > Ie, 2^31 - 1 == MAXINT.  Get an Alpha or an Ultrasparc; fixing tar to
> > use size_t's throughout isn't worth the aggravation when you need a
> > >4GB file.  ;-)
> 
> The problem likely lies in trying to write a file larger than 2^31 bytes,
> rather than in tar outputting that many bytes.  If it seems like there is
> no difference, consider:
> 
> 	tar cvf - . | gzip -c > file.tar.gz
> 
> In this case tar can output more than 2^31 bytes while the gzipped file
> will likely be smaller.
> 
> This may be cheaper than getting an Alpha or Ultrasparc :-)

using GNU tools on an ultrasparc, I still ran into the 4gb size limit.. on
solaris 2.6 anyway, which, I suppose, was running in 32-bit mode, since
2.6 doesn't have a 64 bit kernel.  It was a while ago but I seem to recall
that a different version of TAR would handle the larger files... or
something like that.  was about 14 months back.

--------------------------
Scott M. Stone <sstone@example.com>
Director of Information Technology, Director of Research and Development
ITIsOpen, Inc. - http://www.itisopen.com
Cisco Certified Network Associate, Sun Solaris Certified Systems Administrator