Yodabunny wrote:
Yes, I should have just switched over to my linux partition and ran it from there, but I need the files on my Windows drive and frankly I don't trust Linux's NTFS compatibility enough to transfer these files (it's 35GB of 0.5-1.4MB files) across drives.
Ah. So a horde of files stored on a local NTFS partition? Hopefully, not mission critical data... ;)
On a related note (well, file compression related anyway), ran into an oldie-but-goodie from the "strange problems" department. AE calls up. He's having issues with a tar.gz file he transferred over from a vendor (he's a vendor consultant, so technically from his own site, but whatever). He gunzips the file, but when he tries to untar it, it gives him a checksum error. He's tried multiple copies and can't figure out what's going on. My spidey sense starts tingling cause I know I've run into this before. But what could it be!?
I copy the file. Gunzip it. Untar it. Same checksum error (always have to check for pebkac). Remember what problem likely is. Run file on the tar file and it says it's a gzip compressed file! Lol... Someone gzipped it twice (and renamed it in between). Gotta love that. Rename .tar to .tar.gz. Gunzip again. Untar. Heavens part and music plays. I'll have to remember to add this one to my list of interview problems. Lots of people seem to forget (or don't know) that while unix style OSes don't care about file extensions natively, many of the tools (especially compression tools) are braindead if the extensions don't match what they expect. It's quite possible to ***** yourself renaming files and it's *not* a mistake if the file extension reads something like .tar.Z.gz.gz. It's stupid to have ever created such a monstrosity and someone should be shot, but you'll really ***** yourself over renaming it to clean up the extra long name.