[LON-CAPA-admin] 2147483647 bytes = maximum?

[Guy Albertelli II]

Hi Nathan,

> Right now our library server's tar.gz backup files are approaching an
> apparently magic number of bytes, 2147483647.  From behavior of other linux
> machines I administrate, I'm noticing that it seems to be the largest file
> size for a file created by tar/gziping.
> 
> Right now the files are just over 2GB, but as they approach that number, I'm
> becoming curious.  Is anyone aware of a file-size limitation, what causes
> it, how to work around it, etc?

Fedora Core 2 should be fine. 

[root at s4 /]# tar cvf slash.tar /*
[root at s4 /]# du -h slash.tar
2.4G    slash.tar

(The limitatin came from using a 32bit singed integer for expressing
the addressing into a file. (I.e. I want byte X from the file)

This limitation has been gone from linux for a while, but the method
of fixing it required all applications to be updated to make use of
the new 64bit addressing mechanism.

Fedora Core 2 ships with an updated tar command. So you shouldn't see
any problems.


Looks like Redhat 7.3 is also fine:
[albertel at s10 albertel]$ ls -la large.tar
-rw-rw-r--    1 albertel albertel 3132006400 Aug  3 13:47 large.tar


So you shouldn't see any problems anymore with the 2GB limit.

-- 
guy at albertelli.com  LON-CAPA Developer  0-7-3-9-