[TriLUG] tar-1.14 can't make large files

Jeremy Portzer jeremyp at pobox.com
Fri Jul 30 11:41:50 EDT 2004


On Fri, 2004-07-30 at 11:13, Joseph Mack NA3T wrote:
> I can't make a file over 1Gbyte with tar-1.14 (the latest tar). I have
> glibc-2.3.2, gcc-2.95.3, mke2fs-1.32 (from Nov 2002, the latest e2fsprogs
> is 1.35).
> 
> This is an older system. I'm wondering what else I need to be
> able to make files >1Gbyte.
> 

This is interesting.  The file size limitation that used to exist was
2GiB, not 1Gib.  Usually, the limiting factor was the version of glibc,
but I think yours is new enough to support large files.  Note, however,
that programs must open the file with the O_LARGEFILE option in the
open() syscall, otherwise the 2GiB limit still exists.  However, the
latest tar should definitely be doing this.  (You can use strace to
verify the options being used in the open() syscall).

Try a test like this:
	dd if=/dev/zero of=file1 bs=1045876 count=1500
	dd if=/dev/zero of=file2 bs=1045876 count=1500

That will create two 1500 MiB files.  Then, see if you can tar them up.
	tar -cvf bigfiles.tar file1 file2
The resulting archive should be of course, about 3000 MiB or ~2.9GiB. 
Note that you will of course need about 6 GiB free space for this
exercise.

If you get error messages, please post the exact message.

Jeremy

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