[TriLUG] tar-1.14 can't make large files

[Ed Hill]

On Fri, 2004-07-30 at 11:13, Joseph Mack NA3T wrote:
> I can't make a file over 1Gbyte with tar-1.14 (the latest tar). I have
> glibc-2.3.2, gcc-2.95.3, mke2fs-1.32 (from Nov 2002, the latest e2fsprogs
> is 1.35).
> 
> This is an older system. I'm wondering what else I need to be
> able to make files >1Gbyte.


Hi Joe,

Theres another option.  You can have Gnu tar create a huge archive that
spans multiple files.  The way to do this is to use the tar -L
("--tape-length N") and -F ("--new-volume-script NAME") options to
create a new archive file every, say, 999MB.

I've done this:

echo '#! /usr/bin/env bash' > change_tape
echo 'n=`ls -1 yo.tar.?* 2>/dev/null | wc -l`' >> change_tape
echo 'mv -f yo.tar "yo.tar."$n' >> change_tape
chmod +x change_tape
dd bs=1000000 count=3 if=/dev/zero of=./test
tar --new-volume-script=./change_tape --tape-length 500 -cvf yo.tar
./test
./change_tape

and it works.  To un-tar the multiple files you can either cat them
together or write a simple script that does the reverse:

cat yo.tar.* | tar -xvf -

This sort of thing can produce tar files that span multiple CDRs, etc.

Ed

-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD
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