From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Paul Crawford Subject: Re: File Limits Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2011 15:12:53 +0000 Message-ID: <4D35ADF5.3080403@sat.dundee.ac.uk> References: <4D35552F.9010003@sat.dundee.ac.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE Return-path: In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-msdos-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format="flowed" To: Xavier Tarifa Cc: "linux-msdos@vger.kernel.org" Dear Xavier, Traditionally most UNIX / C language applications used a 32-bit signed=20 integer for file offset operations, hence the 2GB limit. This applied=20 even to DOS 16-bit applications as they also supported 32-bit 'long'=20 integers by special arithmetic. You can get 32-bit applications that support >2GB because they are usin= g=20 special arithmetic to implement 64-bit offsets, but that is of course=20 the 'natural' size for 64-bit applications. At the time this was started 2GB was huge! When DOS was first available= =20 in the early 1980s you could only get 10MB or so HDD. It was only aroun= d=20 1995 that you could get a consumer product HDD with 2GB capacity, let=20 alone consider single files of greater than this. And now my PC has 8GB= =20 of memory! Even today, the likes of fat32 has the problem that a large file (e.g.=20 video or backup archive, etc) can cause a write error if it exceeds 4GB= =2E Regards, Paul On 18/01/11 14:16, Xavier Tarifa wrote: >> The standard limits for 32-bit Linux programs is 2GB per file, even >> though ext3 allows much, much more total space (and file size). > >> Have you tried using a 64-bit Linux and matching dosemu version? > > You're right, a 64-bits linux does work. I would have never thought > that there was such a low limitation, though. It's the first program > I can think of that I've found problems with big files (but the only > other big files that I've used are mainly backups and v=EDdeos so not= a > lot of apps involved). > > Thanks a lot, that would have been probably the last reason I would > think of. --=20 Dr. Paul S. Crawford Satellite Station Dundee University Small's Wynd, Dundee, DD1 4HN, U.K. Tel: +44 (0)1382 38 4687 Email: psc@sat.dundee.ac.uk The University of Dundee is a Scottish Registered Charity, No. SC015096 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-msdos" = in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html