Max file size

[David Collier-Brown]

Justin D Davis wrote:
> 
> I have been doing a little bit of work on updating some of the
> documentation.  I have not found any notes of a max file size, but I
> apparently hit a 2GB limit.  Is this a ext2 issue which I have forgotten
> about?  Or is this a samba issue which should be documented?
> 
> If this is a Samba issue, I would consider it a very large issue we must
> correct.

	It's smort of an OS issue, but it is reported to
	applications, which have to be
	a) large-file safe -- it  causes  no  data
     	   loss  or corruption when it encounters a large file. A util-
 	   ity that is large file safe is unable to process properly  a
	   large file, but returns an appropriate error.
	b) large-file aware  -- if it can process large
	   files  in  the same manner as it does small files

	We're sorta large-file aware, but only on systems which
	support large files: on those we're large-file dozy (;-))

	We really should handle functions which fail and set errno
	to:

     EFBIG An attempt was made to write a file that  exceeds  the
           maximum file size or the process's file size limit, or
           the file is a regular file and an attempt was made  to
           write  at or beyond the offset maximum associated with
           the corresponding stream.

	Alas, we don't, which poses a problem on systems which
	are in transition between small- and large-file capable.

--dave
-- 
David Collier-Brown,           | Always do right. This will gratify 
Performance & Engineering Team | some people and astonish the rest.
Americas Customer Engineering  |                      -- Mark Twain
(905) 415-2849                 | davecb at canada.sun.com