Re: When? 64-Bit lseek()?

Stephen C. Tweedie (sct@dcs.ed.ac.uk)
Thu, 27 Jun 1996 12:31:34 +0100


Hi,

On Fri, 21 Jun 1996 10:31:16 -0500 (CDT), LD Landis
<ldl@ldl.healthpartners.com> said:

> Hi,
> Thanks for your note Harald! So how "standard" is this? Anyone know?
> The man page doesn't betray much (re: POSIX) and also suggests that the
> call is limited to 4GB file sizes. I am curious about:

> (1) What is the current standard/proposal for 64-bits in POSIX-land?
> (the prototype is sufficient for my purposes, don't need all the spec)

There isn't one. Everything* in POSIX is specified to use off_t,
size_t or fpos_t, which can be any size the implementor wants. POSIX
doesn't mandate 32 bits anywhere.

(* Except for fseek and ftell, which use long. Go figure. :)

> (2) What is the current status of 64-bits in POSIX-land?

There isn't one. See above.

What there is is an industry standard specification for 64-bit file
access. It's already implemented on things like the SGIs. See

http://www.sas.com/standards/large.file

for the current status.

>> i386 Linux has a llseek() system call which is used e.g. by fdisk-2.0
>> to partition disks >2GB (I've already tested a 4.5G disk, no problem;
>> and there are quite a number of nice 9+ GB SCSI disks around; unfortunately
>> neither belongs to me :-(

Largest ext2fs filesystem I've heard of was 54GB.

Cheers,
Stephen.

--
Stephen Tweedie <sct@dcs.ed.ac.uk>
Department of Computer Science, Edinburgh University, Scotland.