[Top][All Lists]
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: large file support
From: |
Paul Eggert |
Subject: |
Re: large file support |
Date: |
26 Feb 2003 15:03:41 -0800 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) Emacs/20.3 |
"Craig Rasmussen" <address@hidden> writes:
> The tar header fields impose size and time restrictions on fields in
> them - specifically to 12 octal digits.
Actually, the portable format is 11 octal digits, so it maxes out at
2**33 - 1 bytes.
> So if I had a file that was 2^39 bits (~550 gb) long then I couldn't
> have tar archive all its data.
For files containing 2**33 bytes or more, GNU tar uses an extension
that supports files up to 2**95 - 1 bytes. This should be enough for
a while. Unfortunately it is not necessarily portable to other tar
implementations.
POSIX 1003.1-2001 specifies a different way of specifying large sizes,
which postdates tar's method; nobody has had the time to implement
that with GNU tar yet, though.