> When I run it I get this nice message:
>
> scooter> ./a.out
> EXT2-fs warning (device 08:18): ext2_getblk: block > big
> write:: Input/output error
>
> Now it does make a file:
> scooter> ls -l
> total 66
> -rwxrwxrwx 1 jlnance users 14317 Nov 5 06:53 a.out*
> -rw-rw-rw- 1 jlnance users 555 Nov 5 06:53 big.c
> -rw-rw-rw- 1 jlnance users 18253611008 Nov 5 06:57 bigfile
>
> This file is much larger than 2G. I think its about 18G. The really
> interesting thing is that sometimes it will spontaneously truncate itself:
>
> scooter> dd bs=1k count=10 if=bigfile of=/dev/null
> 10+0 records in
> 10+0 records out
> scooter> ls -l
> total 66
> -rwxrwxrwx 1 jlnance users 14317 Nov 5 06:53 a.out*
> -rw-rw-rw- 1 jlnance users 555 Nov 5 06:53 big.c
> -rw-rw-rw- 1 jlnance users 1073741824 Nov 5 06:57 bigfile
>
> Now its a 1G file :-( I can not always force it to truncate by accessing it,
> but it will always eventually truncate itself if you leave it around for
> long enough and read from it enough.
>
> For anyone who is interested in trying to reproduce this, I used the 2.0.18
> kernel supplied with RedHat 4.0, recompiled with the RedHat 4.0 compiler.
> I am running on an Alphastation 200 4/166 with the SRM console.
[phil@paddington phil]$ uname -a
Linux paddington.london.uk.eu.org 2.1.7 #12-netdev Wed Nov 6 02:47:51 GMT
1996 alpha
[phil@paddington phil]$ ~/bigtest
write:: File too large
[phil@paddington phil]$ ls -l bigfile
-rw-rw-r-- 1 phil phil 2147483648 Nov 6 13:30 bigfile
[phil@paddington phil]$
I make that a 2GB file. Strange. It seems that everybody is seing
different behaviour from this program.
This is on a UDB with (mostly) RedHat 4.0, upgraded to a newer development
kernel. I am using glibc 1.93.
phil