Date: 22 Jun 2000 03:38:52 +0200 From: naddy@mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber) To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Problems with tar? Message-ID: <8irqnc$2q1h$1@bigeye.mips.inka.de> References: <20000621142047.E8223@cs.mcgill.ca>
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Mathew Kanner <mat@cs.mcgill.ca> wrote:
> I just wanted to confirm that I wasn't going crazy. I'm using
> 4.0-STABLE FreeBSD as of Mid april and it seems like tar is silently
> truncating files at about 8 gigs. Am I going crazy or is this a bug?
This seems to be a fundamental limitation of the tar format. I
didn't bother to search for the specs, but if you look at the
hexdump of a tar archive, it's rather obvious that the length is
stored as an octal number in a space-padded ASCII string with a
maximal length of 11 digits.
8^11 == (2^3)^11 == 2^(3*11) == 2^33 == 8G
I just checked star, cpio, and pax (the latter two with SVR4 cpio
format), and they all seem to max out at 8GB or actually even break
at the 2GB marker.
Arguably silent truncation is a bug.
Solaris tar can handle large files (with the 'E' option).
--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de
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