Comments on: File size limit exceeded error under Linux and solution

By: sapy

sapy — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 09:29:04 +0000

what is the entry for root max file size limit to 10 GB?
Thanks in advance.

By: Charanjit Singh

Charanjit Singh — Sat, 01 May 2010 18:53:41 +0000

Hi Chris

Thanks I was also facing the same problem I formatted my USB HDD with ext3 fs after it solved my problem Thanks a ton. I have partition my drive into two part one I had formatted with ext3 (space 120 GB) for testing purpose and rest partition I will format with NTFS (with space 190 GB)and will check again whether this problem will solve in NTFS filesystem or not.

By: IvyAlice

IvyAlice — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:47:08 +0000

What I’m supposed to do when i got this message(when i’m root and i try to copy a too large file, I suppose) but an empty /etc/security/limits.conf file ? (not really empty, but just some comments)

By: Sam

Sam — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:36:49 +0000

I love this Q & A stream. I had the file size limit problem and was able to quickly try all the tests proposed here. It is quite clearly a problem with the program I was using. (SoX as it happens.)

Thanks for an excellent diagnosis!

By: Stephen

Stephen — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:02:53 +0000

I ran into this, where the apparent limit was 16 GB. To cope with lots of little files, i’d gone out of my way to set up the ext3 filesystem with 1 KB blocks. ext3 with 1 KB blocks limits files to 16 GB. Here’s the schedule:

Ubuntu itself does not have file size limits — It depends what file system you are using the standard is ext3. My drive was under 256GB, so i went with 2 KB blocks.

Filesystem File Size Limit Filesystem Size Limit
ext2/ext3 with 1 KiB blocksize 16448 MiB (~ 16 GiB) 2048 GiB (= 2 TiB)
ext2/3 with 2 KiB blocksize 256 GiB 8192 GiB (= 8 TiB)
ext2/3 with 4 KiB blocksize 2048 GiB (= 2 TiB) 8192 GiB (= 8 TiB)
ext2/3 with 8 KiB blocksize (Systems with 8 KiB pages like Alpha only) 65568 GiB (~ 64 TiB) 32768 GiB (= 32 TiB)
ReiserFS 3.5 2 GiB 16384 GiB (= 16 TiB)
ReiserFS 3.6 (as in Linux 2.4) 1 EiB 16384 GiB (= 16 TiB)
XFS 8 EiB 8 EiB
JFS with 512 Bytes blocksize 8 EiB 512 TiB
JFS with 4KiB blocksize 8 EiB 4 PiB
NFSv2 (client side) 2 GiB 8 EiB
NFSv3 (client side) 8 EiB 8 EiB

By: Vasant

Vasant — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 12:27:12 +0000

suggestion of converting usb hdd to ext3 format is good. but that format will not be detected in windows xp. so how to come out this problem.

By: Purna

Purna — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 03:37:18 +0000

try this command.
#dd if=/dev/zero of=/filesize bs=1024 count=xxxx // to create large file.
If this helps you to create expected filesize then filesystem/os does not limits you.

To create this sort of filesize you have to use LFS. becoz bydefault 32bit compilation is able to address at most 2^31 bytes(2GB).
1. open file with O_LARGEFILE flag or’ed with other falgs.
2. compile your code with -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE64 -DLARGEOFFSET_BITS=64

By: Mani

Mani — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:41:21 +0000

Hi,
I tried as per your suggestion.The explanation is very good. It worked well for me. Thanks a lot.

Regards,
Manigandan

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 17:21:41 +0000

Deepan.R:

This is probably due to the filesystem that your hard drive is formatted to. Each filesystem has a file size limit of its own. Chances are that the hard drive is formatted as FAT32, which has a 4GB max filesize. If you need it to be able to deal with larger files, consider reformatting to ext3(with a limit of between 16GB to 2 TB)) or something else.

By: Deepan.R

Deepan.R — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 11:02:21 +0000

Hi,

I too facing the File size limit exceeded error under Linux. But as per the above suggested solution, the ulimit is not setted for the user root, in my case. But still Im getting the error while I connect my USB Hard Drive and try to copy files. No file can be copied more than 4.1GB…I need to copy some 23 GB files and I still have the space in USB.

Kindly inform me what can I do….Mean while, I am aslo searching the web for a solution.

Regards,
Deepan.