Using mergecap I tried to append qty 40 of 100 MByte each libpcap (tcpdump) files, to create a single file for automated tethereal processing, a total of about 4 GBytes. But mergecap failed with 'File size limit exceeded' when writing the output file at 2 GBytes (2^31-1). The error message looks like it was formatted from the 'bash' shell, although using 'cat' I can create an 8 GByte file in 'bash', and mergecap looks like it uses fopen() to a specific filename and not stdout. This was with a locally compiled version of the 20031001 nightly build on SuSE Linux 8.1 (kernel 2.4.19).
Any suggestions to correct this? A workaround would be to process/filter each 100 MByte file in turn, and then append the (much smaller) filtered outputs, but that will get tedious processing each individual file.