On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 00:34:08 -0700, Ben Greear wrote: > Any particular reason why tethereal does not try to open > files with O_LARGEFILE?
Because not all systems on which Ethereal/Tethereal run *have* O_LARGEFILE, and nobody's written any code that allows it to use O_LARGEFILE on systems that support it? Note also that Wiretap (which Ethereal and Tethereal use to read capture files) currently uses "long" as the data type for offsets in files; it uses "standard I/O library" routines such as "fread()", "fseek()", and so on to read the files, *and* requires that file offsets be guaranteed to have integral data types (so it can't rely on routines like "fsetpos()" unless we can be sure that on all UNIXes *AND* on Windows an "fpos_t" is an integral data type), so it uses "long" as that's the data type those routines use for file offsets. Some other scheme would be needed in order to handle large files. In addition, note also that it currently uses zlib to read gzipped files, and zlib also uses "long"s as file offsets on many machines. So one reason is "it's not as easy as somebody might think".
