rsync does hours of "fake-work" after failure

[Frank Steiner]

Hi,

I just stepped on a strange and very annoying bug in rsync-3.1.0 as
shipped with SuSE Linux Enterprise 12, but verified the bug also
with rsync-HEAD-20170123.

I tried to copy some of my movie collection to a usb disk that our
TV could read, so it was formatted with vfat. I forgot that vfat can't
handle files > 4 GB, and some of the movies were larger.

rsync worked for 3 hours copying hundreds of GB, but after it had
finished the last file it complained

rsync: write failed on "/media/disk/some_movie.mpg": File too large (27)
rsync error: error in file IO (code 11) at receiver.c(389) [receiver=3.1.0]

This file had been the third in the list of files to copy, and when
I looked at the usb disk I saw that the two files before and 4 GB of
some_movie.mpg had been copied. But the 400 GB of the remaining files
had not! rsync had claimed to copy each of it, and as I use "-avP" 
I had indeed been watching the progress. The speed and the MB/s
were the usual values for copying to the USB disk.

So rsync doesn't stop and fail at the point it sees the first file
too large for vfat, it just goes on and "fakes" the rest of the
process :-) And because it took some hours, this was a real bad
surprise at the end. 

Below is the output of a little test that can easily be reprocuded.
Is this a known bug? I couldn't find something similar in bugzilla 
or the mailinglist archives.

cu,
Frank

galois [15:42] test 4940) ~/tmp/rsync-HEAD-20170123-0003GMT/rsync -avP . /media/disk/test/
sending incremental file list
created directory /media/disk/test
./
a
              0 100%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#1, to-chk=6/8)
test1.dd
  4,533,766,144 100%  110.55MB/s    0:00:39 (xfr#2, to-chk=5/8)
u
              0 100%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#3, to-chk=4/8)
v
              0 100%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#4, to-chk=3/8)
w
              0 100%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#5, to-chk=2/8)
x
              0 100%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#6, to-chk=1/8)
y
              0 100%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#7, to-chk=0/8)
rsync: write failed on "/media/disk/test/test1.dd": File too large (27)
rsync error: error in file IO (code 11) at receiver.c(389) [receiver=3.1.0]


galois [15:43] test 4942) ls -la /media/disk/test/
total 4194368
drwx------ 2 fst mmh      32768 Oct  5 15:43 .
drwx------ 5 fst mmh      32768 Oct  5 15:42 ..
-rw------- 1 fst mmh          0 Oct  5 15:41 a
-rw------- 1 fst mmh 4294967295 Jan  1  1970 test1.dd
galois [15:43] test 4943) 



-- 
Dipl.-Inform. Frank Steiner   Web:  http://www.bio.ifi.lmu.de/~steiner/
Lehrstuhl f. Bioinformatik    Mail: http://www.bio.ifi.lmu.de/~steiner/m/
LMU, Amalienstr. 17           Phone: +49 89 2180-4049
80333 Muenchen, Germany       Fax:   +49 89 2180-99-4049
* Rekursion kann man erst verstehen, wenn man Rekursion verstanden hat. *