Solaris

I'm trying to tar a bunch of files off to a tape, but for one specific file (it is fairly large, roughly 10Gb) I get the error:

too large to archive

Does tar have a limit of the size of file it can write off to tape? I'm using SunOS 5.8.

Thanks!
-Fred

Well the tar man page says: So why not read the largefile man page?

The man page for largefile says that tar is "large file aware" ... so why would I have received that message to begin with?

Hmmm... good question! Sun has made the source code available. Looking at tar.c, I see that the limit is from this line:
#define TAR_OFFSET_MAX 077777777777

That is only eleven octal digits and it looks like 12 should be able to fit. So I guess that I don't know why that is.

Code:

$ bc
ibase=8
77777777777
8589934591

So I guess that 8,589,934,591 is the limit.

Would tar-1.15.1 be able to "tar" files of 10Gb+?

Fred - you asked "So is it possible to tar a 10GB+ file? How???" in the wrong thread - I deleted it but posted this to keep the info in your thread.

I do not use GNU tar, but I read the documentation. It seems to support a variety of archive format and some of them should be able to do it. The default archive format is selected at compile time so I guess you should specify the format to be sure.
--format=gnu.
--format=posix

are the two formats which the docs claim support unlimited files. The posix format is a newer format than Sun uses.
--format=ustar
would select the older posix format in use by Sun.

So while I haven't tried this, I think it should work.


Edit: The GNU tar docs is a very useful document so I will include a link.