inquiry concerning tar maximum archive size

[grenoml]

Hello.
  I have been using RedHat 8.0 then 9 for a while (almost 2 years). 
The version of GNU tar that is included with RH is tar-1.13.25-8.  I
have written some backup and restore scripts that utilize tar and the
--incremental and the --listed-incremental flags.  I do a 'tar zcvf'
and create .tgz dumps.  Everything has been running well for quite a
while up until a couple months ago when I began noticing that the
'snapshot-file' containing the state of the filesystem began showing up
as a zero-length file all the time on one filesystem and this
apparently caused all the following incrementals on that filesystem to
become full dumps.  When I looked at the size of these incrementals
something struck me as significant about the file size: 2147483647. 
This is the maximum size of a 2's complement 32-bit signed integer.  So
my question is this: is there some internal limitation in tar as to the
maximum size of an archive?  Is this somehow configurable?  Is this
just a bug?  If so, has it been fixed in some newer release?

  I have looked through all the docs I could find and did some
searching but I didn't locate any references to this problem.

thx,
Gerry Reno


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