Re: tar limitations?

[Tod McQuillin <devin@example.com>]

Following up to my own post...

On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Tod McQuillin wrote:

> The problem likely lies in trying to write a file larger than 2^31 bytes,
> rather than in tar outputting that many bytes.  [...]
>
> 	tar cvf - . | gzip -c > file.tar.gz

I forgot to mention that gzip can take a *long* time to compress 2 gigs of
data, especially on slower machines.

If you have the disk space (and it sounds like you do) then you can also
just split the .tar file into multiple chunks, where each chunk is less
than 2GB, using split:

	tar cvf - . | split -b 1024m - file.tar.

This will produce multiple files, like file.tar.aa, file.tar.ab,
file.tar.ac, etc.

Later these can be fed back into tar with cat:

	cat file.tar.* | tar tvf -
-- 
Tod McQuillin