Hi all,
My company is running into problems with tar, because we need a container for quite large files. There are varying reports to the maximum file-size that tar can support, but it appears that it was originally 2GB, later extended to 8GB, and most recently extended to 68 GB. Admitadly these numbers are based on non-GNU documentation, because I can't find much in the way of documentation.
Apache Compress Commons (Java) 's most recent version still caps the filesize at 8GB[1]. Citing the max value represented by 11 Octal chars.
Testing on a Mac OS X machine with tar (GNU tar) 1.27.1 with standard options worked successfully on an 80GB file.
Quickly inspecting the GNU Tar source this morning I was able to follow the path from "xheader.c" `size_coder` => eventually "misc.c" `sysinttostr` which implies that the file size is getting encoded as a string. Before digging more into the GNUTar codebase, I wondered if I could get some clarification about the following questions.
What is the largest file that a tar can store?
Did I get "lucky" that my tar completed successfully on such a large file?