File size limits

[John W. Eaton]

On  1-Jun-2006, Quentin Spencer wrote:

| I'm trying to read a 3 GB wav file, and on Linux I get a 'File too 
| large' error when wavread runs the fopen command, but it works on 
| Windows (it has other errors, but I think I can debug those myself). 
| Now, I'm using the ext2 filesystem, which seems to support the large 
| file size just fine, so why can't I open it?

The short answer is that because Octave ultimately uses the C library
function fopen to open the file, it can't handle files larger than
2^31 bytes on 32-bit systems.  On 64-bit systems, it should just work.
To make it work on 32-bit systems will require some (but perhaps not
much) work.  If anyone is interested in working on this problem,
please discuss your ideas on the maintainers list.  I'd like this to
be implemented cleanly, without sprinkling #ifdefs all over the code.

jwe