From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Jun 21 21:30:59 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail.inka.de (quechua.inka.de [212.227.14.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 26C3D37C167 for ; Wed, 21 Jun 2000 21:30:55 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from daemon@mips.inka.de) Received: from bigeye.mips.inka.de (uucp@) by mail.inka.de with local-bsmtp id 134ydg-0007px-00; Thu, 22 Jun 2000 06:30:52 +0200 Received: (from daemon@localhost) by bigeye.mips.inka.de (8.9.3/8.9.3) id DAA92223 for freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; Thu, 22 Jun 2000 03:38:53 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from daemon) From: naddy@mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber) Subject: Re: Problems with tar? Date: 22 Jun 2000 03:38:52 +0200 Message-ID: <8irqnc$2q1h$1@bigeye.mips.inka.de> References: <20000621142047.E8223@cs.mcgill.ca> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Mathew Kanner 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message