Gnu Tar.

[Kadam, Rakhi]

Hi,

We are using the GNU tar utility (1.12). Recently we faced a problem while
archiving  files
greater than 2GB in size.

The system is an IRIX 6.5.
The compiler that was used to build the tar executable treats "long" data
type as 4 bytes.
whereas the size of "stat.st_size" is 8 bytes.

The above condition is not handled appropriately in the function "dump_file"
in module CREATE.C
The variable "sizeleft" is declared as "long". We are further assigning to
it the value of current_stat.st_size.

If stat system call returns a size of file greater than 2GB and if it is
assigned to a 4 byte variable it becomes negative. 
As a result of this, the file does not get archived and no error is
displayed, giving an impression 
that the file is archived successfully.

If you list the contents of the tar file you can see a negative file size.

If this file is extracted the file is extracted with  "0" bytes.

We will be modifying the gtar code to handle this.
Has anyone encountered this problem before ?

Thanks & Regards,
Rakhi.