tar & ulimit are pissing me off.

[Stephen M. Youndt]

The title says it all.  I've been trying to get the gcc archive on and off
for the past 3 months, without any luck.  No matter what I do, either tar
or ulimit seems to bite me.  There is a tunable parameter ULIMIT as well as
what seems to be an undocumented command 'ulimit'.  Using 'ulimit 10000'
allows me to create files of up to 5 Meg (approx), while changing the
ULIMIT parameter doesn't seem to do anything at all.  The problem is that
the 'ulimit' command is not inherited by uucp (even when I put the command in
an /etc/rc2.d/S* file and reboot the system).  So, the problem remains that
I can't receive files of over 2 Meg via uucp.  You might suggest at this point
that I get the archive broken down into more manageable chunks.  Great idea!
I tried this, and I received the archive fine.

Problem #2 is that even though I can 

 ulimit 20000
 cat gcc-1.36.tar.Z.*[0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10] > gcc-1.36.tar.Z
 uncompress gcc-1.36.tar
 tar xf gcc-1.36.tar

At this point I get, "tar: directory checksum error" or something thereabouts
which has the effect of depriving me of what seem to be some fairly vital
files. 

I'm running Bell Tech Unix 3.2u, and I'd like to know what to do about either,
or both of these problems.  Is there is way to permanently set ULIMIT?  Is this
a known bug with 'tar', or is there something less apparent screwed up? Thanks
in advance.

			Stephen M. Youndt (uunet!hacker!steve)