Darxus <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: | On 27 Oct 1998, Gary L. Hennigan wrote: | | > | > I felt like checking. Oops. When I reinstalled & tried to | > | > restore it, I | > | > found out that gzip can't seek to the end of the file (dies | > | > around 2gb?). | > | | > | You can force gzip to handle it as a stream. Try something like: | > | | > | cat tarfile.tgz | gunzip -c | tar xvf - | > | | > | The "-c" tells gunzip to pipe it to stdout, and the "xvf -" tells tar | > | to verbosely extract the file coming into stdin. If I understand your | > | problem correctly, this should work. | > | > It's even simpler: | > | > gzip -d -c tarfile.tgz |tar xvf - | > | > or, if you're using GNU Tar, and you are under Debian): | > | > tar xzvf tarfile.tgz | | They are both lovely suggestions, unfortunately the problem is a bit more | substantial. The 1st thing I tried was "tar -zxvf home.tgz", and a couple | of the things I tried soon after that were cat and less. Neither of which | read any of it -- less is the only thing that did anything useful, which | was saying "Cannot seek to that file position" which made me think "hmm, | did I hear something about stuff not being able to seek past 2gb??"
Yikes! I missed your original post. That's what I get for replying to you via someone else's reply and not reading the subject closely enough. Duh? Where on earth did you store this file? I could've sworn the ext2fs had a 2GB/file limit on it? Certainly all the file utilities do. It has to do with the file pointers being 32-bit signed integers. Nothing that uses a libc call is going to be able to read beyond 2^31 bits (which is exactly 2GB) on a 80x86 based system, e.g. Pentium/PentiumII/386/486 based systems. | You might think that it would sit there chewing on the file for a bit | before it got to some point beyond what it could deal with. Nope. Didn't | even start -- failed to even open the file up. No, compressed files have to be read entirely before being uncompressed. Or at least that's a requirement of most compression schemes. Don't recall the exact reason though. Something about storing the keys at the end of the file? | Any more ideas ? :) Only thing I can think of is getting access to a 64-bit machine, decompressing the file there, tarring the contents off to tape and then restoring them on your machine. Or at least putting them into sub-2GB chunks before taking them back. You might have some luck under Windows, though I have a deep suspicion that you'll get the same results? Sorry! Gary
