On Mon, Jan 02, 2006 at 05:35:28PM +0000, Nuno Morgadinho wrote:
> How to use tar(1) to compress ridiculous large files?
>
> #tar cvfz /dev/rst0 /fitabackup
> /fitabackup/server1.tgz
> /fitabackup/server3.tgz
> * tar: File is too long for ustar /fitabackup/server3.tgz *
>
> server3.tgz has 10.0Gb.
Use another tar format. OpenBSD tar does not seem able to do this; you
may wish to look at other archivers. star has a lot of options in this
direction, at least - it may have one which will do what you want.
Of course, you don't need to use tar(1), per se. Specifically, in the
case mentioned above, there's no reason not to just cat twice unless the
original compression was done very inefficiently - and even then, just
piping through gzip is more efficient. (Though I'm no more than 'fairly
certain' that gzip will handle files this large.)
Joachim
