Showing posts with label Unix. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Unix. Show all posts

2008-12-03

diff large files under Solaris

Did you ever notice that the diff command cannot handle files larger 2 GB under SunOS Solaris? You will get a nice error message like:

Error: Value too large for defined data type
That is because its file I/O calls are based on 32 bit file offsets. Luckily Sun provides the alternate bdiff command, which uses 64 bit offsets. They could have just fixed diff in the first place, but whatever...