Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Sat, 09 Jan 1999 20:43:04 +1000
From:      Greg Black <gjb@acm.org>
To:        "Aaron D. Gifford" <agifford@infowest.com>
Cc:        questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Why won\'t TAR cooperate\? 
Message-ID:  <19990109104305.9273.qmail@alice.gba.oz.au>
In-Reply-To: <3696DB34.29D87B41@infowest.com>  of Fri, 08 Jan 1999 21:29:40 MST
References:  <199901070249.TAA02192@infowest.com> <19990107190309.446.qmail@alice.gba.oz.au> <3696DB34.29D87B41@infowest.com> 

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> > Try it with dd to ensure that you can read the file and write
> > the whole thing to the tape:
> > 
> >     dd if=big_file obs=64k of=/dev/tape_device
> 
> Thanks, dd in fact worked perfectly.  I even used tar and piped the
> output of tar to dd and that worked:

So you know that the tape is big enough and that there's no
problem writing a big file to it -- no surprises there.

> It still puzzles me that tar when used alone always stopped at the same
> spot every time I tried it.

I no longer have your original message, but I seem to recall
that you used some tar option for comparing the archived file
with the original -- if so, that could have been the problem, as
it's certainly the kind of thing that you'd expect to have bugs
in, given the fact that nobody ever uses it ...

> I've used tar just fine on other huge files
> saved to HD instead of tape, but try as I might, tar would not write the
> large file to my tape.  The only supposition I can fathom at this point
> is that tar believed that the tape was shorter than it really was.

There's no way for tar to believe anything about the size of the
tape unless it got a write error -- and since dd got no such
error, tar would not have either.

> Kevin Street wrote:
> >Do the login.conf filesize settings apply to tapes?  What does `limits'
> >say yours is set to?
> 
> Hmmm, once I 'su' to root (which I did) would this matter?

File size limits do not apply to tapes.  Limits do apply to root
but they're usually different from thos for normal users and,
since this was a tape, there are no limits.

-- 
Greg Black <gjb@acm.org>


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19990109104305.9273.qmail>