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| -rw-r--r-- | INSTALL | 25 |
1 files changed, 22 insertions, 3 deletions
@@ -730,11 +730,30 @@ or by Eventually (by perl v5.6.0) this internal confusion ought to disappear, and these options may disappear as well. +=head2 Large file support. + +Since Perl 5.6.0 Perl has supported large files (files larger than +2 gigabytes), and in many common platforms like Linux or Solaris this +support is on by default. + +This is both good and bad. It is good in that you can use large files, +seek(), stat(), and -s them. It is bad if you are interfacing Perl +using some extension, also the components you are connecting to must +be large file aware: if Perl thinks files can be large but the other +parts of the software puzzle do not understand the concept, bad things +will happen. One popular extension suffering from this ailment is the +Apache extension mod_perl. + +There's also one known limitation with the current large files +implementation: unless you also have 64-bit integers (see the next +section), you cannot use the printf/sprintf non-decimal integer +formats like C<%x> to print filesizes. You can use C<%d>, though. + =head2 64 bit support. -If your platform does not have 64 bits natively, but can simulate them with -compiler flags and/or C<long long> or C<int64_t>, you can build a perl that -uses 64 bits. +If your platform does not have 64 bits natively, but can simulate them +with compiler flags and/or C<long long> or C<int64_t>, you can build a +perl that uses 64 bits. There are actually two modes of 64-bitness: the first one is achieved using Configure -Duse64bitint and the second one using Configure |