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lfs confusion

John Hunter jdhunter at ace.bsd.uchicago.edu
Fri Sep 24 07:22:29 EDT 2004 
>>>>> "Andrew" == Andrew Dalke <dalke at dalkescientific.com> writes:

    >> I pass the 2**31 test but fail your sys.maxint * 3L
    Andrew> Huh.  I wonder what's going on there.  Perhaps the Windows
    Andrew> API used handles up to 2**32?

No, I can do 2**32 and much higher.  Apparently, the limit on my
system is sys.maxint (which is *really big*)

  >>> import sys
  >>> sys.maxint
  9223372036854775807
  >>> fd.seek(sys.maxint)
  >>> fd.seek(sys.maxint+1)
  Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
  OverflowError: long int too large to convert to int
  >>> fd.tell()
  0

I suddenly realize what is going on.  The CPU, the AMD Opteron 250, is
a 64 bit processor.  I just got this machine and didn't know what kind
of CPU it had.

  >>> 2**63
  9223372036854775808L

Apparently, on 64bit systems, tell returns an int because an int can
address 2**63 bytes.  So the acid test in the 64 bit era for LFS is to
try and seek to 2**31, not to check the return type of tell.

JDH
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