writing large files quickly

[Grant Edwards]

On 2006-01-27, rbt <rbt at athop1.ath.vt.edu> wrote:

> OK, I'm still trying to pick my jaw up off of the floor. One
> question...  how big of a file could this method create? 20GB,
> 30GB, limit depends on filesystem, etc?

Right.  Back in the day, the old libc and ext2 code had a 2GB
file size limit at one point (it used an signed 32 bit value
to keep track of file size/position).  That was back when 1GB
drive was something to brag about, so it wasn't a big deal for
most people.

I think everthing has large file support is enabled by default
now, so the limit is 2^63 for most "modern" filesystems --
that's the limit of the file size you can create using the
seek() trick.  The limit for actual on-disk bytes may not be
that large.

Here's a good link:

http://www.suse.de/~aj/linux_lfs.html

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