limit on tar

[unixkid]

is there a 2gb limit on tar?

 

[bi]

Yes on a per-file basis. You could have a 4 GB tar with one 2 GB file and two 1 GB files, for example.

I don't think dd has the same 2 GB limitation, but I'm not sure.

 

[unixkid]

I knew with 2.5 and below there was limt but I thought 2.6 there wasn't a limit on tar. I trying to tar up a bunch-o-files that would be more than 2gb in size...

 

[bi]

The man page for largefile does say that tar is largefile aware, so I guess you should be able to tar a larger file. Other Unix systems don't support large files for tar.

Are you tarring to another file or to a tape? If you are tarring to another file, perhaps you are running out of room in your filesystem? or the filesystem isn't large file enabled (if there is such a thing in Sun)? Are you doing this as root? Can all users create large files?

 

[cfsalmeida]

YES, you are right! since version 2.6 solaris suport largefiles, a largefile is a file (in a 32-bits system), greater than 2GB, up to 1 terabyte, when you create a UFS filesystem on Solaris >=2.6, by default you are able to create 2-GB or larger files on it,however, when you create a VXFS filesystem, you must specify a special option (-o largefiles) to the 'mkfs' command, if this option is not specified, you will be unable to create >2GB files on the VXFS filesystem, even though you are on Solaris >=2.6.
The tar version bundled with Solaris may have some problems with largefiles, but you can use "GNU-tar", gnu tar supports largefiles (>2GB) since version 1.1.2, you can get gnu-tar 1.1.3 in pkgadd format in "

http://www.sunfreware.com".

Hope this helps.
Regards,

Carlos Almeida.