Can't copy giant file (*not* ULIMIT problem)

[Richard H. Douglas]

jim at crom2.uucp (James P. H. Fuller) writes:
> 
>      I can't copy a 24-meg file without getting it truncated to 16 megs.
> 
>      The files to be copied are on filesystems that are type DOS -- that's
> Interactive-speak for DOS partitions that are mounted as Unix filesystems,
> which ISC SysV allows...
> 
> 
> it only copies part of the file -- when the prompt comes back there's a file
> called gbpri.seq in the proper place on the Unix partition but it's only
> (only!) 17,208,832 bytes long where the original is 26,090,050 bytes.  There's
> plenty of room (presently 135 megs free) in the /usr4 filesystem and I can't
> think of any other reason why a large file shouldn't copy properly.
> 
...                                              

I do not have you problem now because I completely eliminated DOS
from my machine and upgraded to full Unix. However, on my older
Xenix kernal, this was some kind of limit based on the 16 bit
addressing that dos had. So not only did you have problems on
large files, but also on large dos partitions (bigger that 20Meg
I believe). Perhaps you can convert the file to pure text, split
is into smaller segments and then copy it into you Unix partition.
The final problem then will be in recombining the file somehow so
that it makes sense to you.

If it were me, I would get on the case if ISC. I would have
thought that this would have been fixed by now. 

BTW, I am told that early Xenix 286 and 386 had this problem too.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Rich Douglas     doug at ohenry