Re: how do I extract a 2.6 gigabyte .tar.gz file ? (the saga continues)
On Thu, Oct 29, 1998 at 12:39:59AM -0600, Mark Panzer wrote:
> Darxus wrote:
> >
> > I installed Windows (see what you made me do??).
> > I installed WinZip.
> > I told WinZip to open my 2.6gb home.tgz file... it said okay... it said
> > this file contains home.tar, you want me to extract it to a temp dir &
> > open it ?
> >
> > So unlike our beloved Unix utilities, winzip CAN seek past 2gb. BUT it
> > can't untar and unzip at the same time, and since I don't have over 5.2gb
> > of fat32 storage space, I don't have enough room to extract the .tar that
> > my .tgz contains to a temp dir. So I still can't get my files. (ARGH)
> >
>
> I'm guessing Win95 can go out to 4GB 2^32 so maybe if you tried to
> extract this archive in Win it still wouldn't work
Win95/NT have 64 bit system calls for seek() et al., so the limit is
probably more than 4GB with FAT32.
> (BTW: how did this file get created? The whole thing would have to be
> over 4GB uncompressed (right?)) Well here's what you can assume, 1.
> The file you want is in this archive but you cannot seek past 2.0GB 2.
> It would be a very large effort to recompile libc for >2GB (and all of
> the associated programs). 3. You can access this file via M$ related
> utilities.
>
The 2GB limit is not imposed by ext2fs; it's a limitation of the VFS
(Virtual Filesystem) layer in the kernel. Linus has so far resisted
the extension of file sizes to 64 bit on 32 bit architectures, because
he doesn't like the code that gcc generates for 64-bit arithmetic. So
I'm kind of curious as to how you could generate a >2GB file under
Linux at all, under any filesystem.
miket
Reply to: