TODO: Large tgzs, how and what?

Leonard den Ottolander leonard at den.ottolander.nl
Sun Sep 19 11:29:14 UTC 2004


Hi,

There is some confusion as to what the entry:
"Broken pipe warning when viewing large *.tar.gz files.  Warnings should
be shown before the viewer is started if possible."
is supposed to address.

When opening a large tgz I do not see a "broken pipe" warning. I do see
a "gzip: stdout: No space left on device" followed by a "Cannot open tar
archive <name>".

There are a few problems with this issue. Firstly I don't know how to
reproduce that particular error. Secondly, for tgzs larger than 4GB gzip
will return the expanded size modulo 2^32. A check for disk space needed
will thus be fuzzy (increase estimated expanded size by 4GB until larger
than unexpanded size?). Thirdly for bzipped files there seems to be no
way to establish expanded size whatsoever (use unexpanded size as an
estimate for expanded size? Use a factor?).

All in all it is not entirely clear what should be fixed. If you do
think a (fuzzy) check should be added, do you have any suggestions where
in the code this check should be done?

Leonard.

-- 
mount -t life -o ro /dev/dna /genetic/research





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