[PLUG] A cheer for Linux - largefile

[Michael Rasmussen]

At work I'm dealing with Solaris 9 systems.  One of them is running an
application with some performance issues so the vendor asked for a debug
log file.  The first one created was 11G.  No problem, I thought, log
files compress really well.  gzip barfed on the file.  A little research
showed that not all programs in the Solaris world can work with large
files - in fact there's a man page entry that describes what is
"largefile" capable and what is not.  It indicated that compress would
be able to handle the file.  compress barfed.  As did split, perl and
every other utility I tried. They all died about the time the read hit
the 4GB mark.

So I got creative.  Re-ran the process, did a `tail -f logfile | perl
<prg2make_little_files>`  it barfed.  The vendor said to send what I had
and they'd work with that.

Come home tonight and create an 11G file by catting all the logfiles I
have on my system multiple times.  Everything I try on it works.
Increase the file size to 17G everything I've tried so far still works.
This is all on a vanilla install Debian system.

One hears a lot of discussion about Linux having features needed by
enterprise customers.  In the area of support for large files it seems
to be doing quite nicely compared to a "real" Unix.



-- 
    Michael Rasmussen, Portland Oregon  
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