Today, we don't create the sparse file "with the required size" when it is first opened. We could try seeking to maximum size of the device and writing a single byte, and seeing whether or not that fails, and if it fails, *assume* that this was caused by the target file system not supporting such a large file. There are other reasons why the write might fail (for example, the system administrator or some supervisor program might have set a file size limit via the setrlimit(3) systme call or the /etc/security/limits.h file.
Also note not there is no supported way for a userspace program to query the kernel to find the maximum file size supported by a particular file system. It will depend on the file system type, the file system block size, and potentially, file system features that might be enabled on a particular file system. I agree that it would be nice to print a more user-friendly error message, and right away, as opposed after writing up to 16TB of image file. We just want to make sure if the system administrator has set a maximum file size of say, 2 GiB, and we print a message that it's a file system limitation, that will be confusing and will result in my getting angry bug reports. :-) -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2063369 Title: e2image reports invalid argument when used with big partitions To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/e2fsprogs/+bug/2063369/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
