Re: [tlug] backups

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Mauro" == Mauro Sauco <mauro.sauco@example.com> writes:

    >> What is the maximum filesize in Linux these days? :)

    Mauro> It depends of the file system, the default block size and

I don't think this is true; of course if the filesystem is smaller
than the file you want to create, you're out of luck.  But...

    Mauro> the VFS layer int he kernel, for 2.2 kernels it was 2G but
    Mauro> now for 2.4 it's far biger ...

The real issue is ssize_t (or its equivalent for your extension of
POSIX types to big file sizes).  Unix filesystem semantics generally
has operations return a number of bytes successfully operated on, or
-1 for failure of some kind (EOF, error, whatever).

You probably could cast ssize_t returns to size_t and get 
(2^WORDSIZE - 2) instead of (2^(WORDSIZE-1) - 1) as the maximum size,
but the idea of returning -1 for EOF is already broken enough, let's
not strain ourselves.  ;-)


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