Something is not properly reset after dd dumps a 4.2GB file on an NFS mounted
disk. The system is an AlphaStation 600 5/333, under DigUNIX 4.0 (Rev. 386)
with no patches applied, with external drives (a SONY 4mm, an Exabyte 8mm and
a Tandberg QIC). The NFS mounted disk is an 18.2GB physically attached to
a DPW600au (running 4.0E unpatched), formatted as a single partition "c" with
about 15GB useable. The mount point on the AlphaStation is /c/d1.
With the large disk empty, I started "dd if=/dev/x of=/c/d1/filnam ibs=1024 \
conv=swab", and after 14 hrs I got a file of length 4,194,041,856 bytes on
the disk, and df reported that disk as being 27% full.
When repeating the command for a second tape, I received the dreaded "No space
left on device" message from dd. However, cp started copying the large file
onto a new file very happily, so there was no question that there was space
in /c/d1. Tried remounting tape, a different tape, cycling power on the
tape drives to no avail. The files /dev/null and /dev/x seemed to be OK too.
It took rebooting the AlphaStation before I was able to start copying the
second tape to disk.
Question I: Is this a known problem when handling very long files? Any
patch/workaround known to avoid rebooting?
Question II: The "offset" argument of the c function fseek is a 4 byte
integer that can take positive and negative arguments. Thus, fseek is not
the appropriate function to position the file pointer absolutely on a file
longer than about 2GB. Is there an equivalent function based on 8 byte
integers? Or am I stuck with using negative offsets from EOF for the
second half of a 4GB file?
Thanks for any inputs.
Enrique
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| Dr. Enrique A. Caponi Ocean Technology Department |
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Received on Tue Jan 19 1999 - 21:11:19 NZDT