Re: [SLUG] cp, mv, and files that are too big.

From: Paul Braman (aeon@tampabay.rr.com)
Date: Wed Jul 04 2001 - 08:57:00 EDT


On Tue, 3 Jul 2001, Norbert Omar Cartagena wrote:

> Ok, did I miss something here? I made a (rather massive) backup file
> of my computer because of some EXTREMELY nsaty problems I was having
> with my system (it was easier to blast it away than to try to fix it.
> I have "bigger fish to fry"). I created a .tgz file as back up (the
> file is about 3.1gigs - lots of .mp3s, especially old 1/2 hour radio
> shows). I stored it on a partition that's about 4.5 gigs (/dev/hdb6,
> an ext2 drive). I keep trying to move it to my other hard drive (same
> system, 40gig drive, /dev/hda3, ReiserFS). However, whenever I try to
> copy or move the file, at about 2gigs it stops and complains that the
> file is too big. Anything I can do about this or did I just loose all
> that information? Can I expand the file from one location to another
> (tar xvzf source.tgz /home/location/[...])?

You can always do this little hack to move a file from /path/to/orig to
/path/to/new:

        cd /path/to/orig
        tar cf - really-big-file.foo | ( cd /path/to/new && tar xf - )

That gets around the "big file" problem that cp, etc. will have.

Paul Braman
aeon@tampabay.rr.com



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 15:29:26 EDT