Value too large to be stored in data type -- gzipped tarball

[Nikolas Britton]

On 12/18/05, TuxGirl <tuxgirl at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I have a gzipped tarball that I created on my box when i was running
> > > Linux, and I burned it, along with some other files, onto a dvd.  I'm
> > > now trying to extract the tarball, but it appears that it must be over
> > > some sort of filesystem limit or something.  None of the commands that
> > > I have tried seem to like the file.  Each of them gives the same
> >
> > [snip]
> >
> > > I'm fairly certain that the tarball is fine, because it worked fine on
> > > my server last week, when i opened it up there...
> >
> > Might want try a different implementation of tar then....
> > cd /usr/ports/archivers; make search name="tar"| more
>
> I will try this, however, when I mentioned that other commands were
> also not playing nicely with the file, I was referring to commands
> such as cp, mv, and ls.  I'll see if another tar command will work,
> though.  thanks for the reply!
> ~Erin
>

There is nothing wrong with tar and large files, it's synonymous with
what tar is used for. I think your problem is just a Linux tar to
FreeBSD tar quirk. I had no problems with the 3.3GB testfile I made
for tar and gzip to play with:

> uname -a
FreeBSD spectra.intranet 6.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE #0: Sun Dec
11 02:56:58 CST 2005    
nbritton at spectra.intranet:/usr/src/sys/i386/compile/Info-Matic  i386

> cat /dev/random > testfile

> ls -al testfile
-rw-r--r--  1 nbritton  nbritton  3526029312 Dec 18 22:12 testfile

> md5 testfile
MD5 (testfile) = 83e574c15a7daf44f063d140d3577630

> tar -czf testfile.tar.gz testfile

> ls -al testfile*
-rw-r--r--  1 nbritton  nbritton  3526029312 Dec 18 22:12 testfile
-rw-r--r--  1 nbritton  nbritton  3527105097 Dec 18 22:32 testfile.tar.gz

> rm testfile; tar -xf testfile.tar.gz; md5 testfile
MD5 (testfile) = 83e574c15a7daf44f063d140d3577630