Phillip-
Thanks for the explanation of how this works- I'll check it out & let you
know if that is the source of the problem in my case. If it is, perhaps I
can submit a short paragraph for the documentation that will clue people in
if they run into this in the future. I suppose it could be handled more
gracefully in the code by specifying a tempfile location as you suggest, but
since it isn't really broken, I'd vote that documenting the potential
constraint is a valid and time-saving "fix" that will let you put off
messing with the code until you have a more compelling reason to work with
it.
-NF
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Philip Warner [mailto:pjw@rhyme.com.au]
> Sent: Friday, August 01, 2003 6:37 PM
> To: nickf@ontko.com; pgsql-bugs@postgresql.org
> Subject: Re: [BUGS] pg_dump failure in tar format.
>
>
> At 02:47 PM 1/08/2003 -0500, Nick Fankhauser - Doxpop wrote:
> >pg_dump: [tar archiver] could not write to tar member (wrote 39,
> attempted
> >166)
>
> One of the nasty features of TAR format is that it needs to know the file
> size before adding it to the archive. As a result, pg_dump stores
> the file
> in the /tmp directory before moving it to the actual output file.
> For huge
> files, this means /tmp must be able to cope with the uncompressed size of
> the largest table. It's horrible, I know, which is why I use -Fc, but I'd
> guess this is the cause of your error.
>
> It uses tmpfile() to get a temp file, so I can't see a simple way to test
> this, unless you can free up 2+GB in /tmp?
>
> Please let me know if this is the cause, and if you can not test
> it, I will
> try to send a patch to (temporarily) avoid using tmpfile(). Ideally, I
> suppose pg_dump should support the ability to override the
> tmpfile() location.
>
> Bye for now,
>
> Philip
>
>
>
>
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