I recently tried splitting up a 4.4 gigabyte file into 650MB portions for backup purposes using the ‚split ‚ command line app. When I came to restore the original file with the ‚cat‚ command line app, I ran into a problem.
The cluster size of 1024 on my main BeOS disk was inadequate for reforming the 4.4 gigabyte file. It gave me an error saying no space left on device, even though I had plenty of disk space. I persevered till I tried formatting another hard disk in my system, this time using the cluster size of 4096.
I redirected the output of the ‚cat‚ command to that disk and it worked!
This goes to show that the cluster size really does matter using large files. So, to summarize, if ‚cat‚ is giving you problems with large files, create a larger cluster sized bfs partition and it should work as expected.