Limit file size linux

File Size Limit Exceeded Error Under Linux and Solution

I am trying to copy a file called act.dat. I do have enough disk space to copy this file. I am getting an error “file size limit exceeded” under Linux. How do I get rid of this error?

Your system administrator must have imposed limitation on your account for file size creation. You need to use the ulimit command to find out file size limitation. This command provides control over the resources available

Tutorial details
Difficulty level	Easy
Root privileges	Yes
Requirements	None
Est. reading time	5m

to processes started by the shell, on systems that allow such control.

Task: Find out the current resources available to your shell / account

Open the Terminal and then type the following command:
ulimit -a
Sample outputs:

The above output clearly stat that you can create file size upto 5MB limit. To change this limit or if you do not wish to have a limit you can edit your /etc/security/limits.conf file (login as the root):
# vi /etc/security/limits.conf
Look for your username and fsize parameter. Delete this line or set new parameter. For example consider following entry where I am setting new file size limit to 1 GB:

Save the changes. Log out and log back in for the changes to take effect.

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Now, your limit is 1GB file size. If you do not want any limit remove fsize from /etc/security/limits.conf.

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I too facing the File size limit exceeded error under Linux. But as per the above suggested solution, the ulimit is not setted for the user root, in my case. But still Im getting the error while I connect my USB Hard Drive and try to copy files. No file can be copied more than 4.1GB…I need to copy some 23 GB files and I still have the space in USB.

Kindly inform me what can I do….Mean while, I am aslo searching the web for a solution.

This is probably due to the filesystem that your hard drive is formatted to. Each filesystem has a file size limit of its own. Chances are that the hard drive is formatted as FAT32, which has a 4GB max filesize. If you need it to be able to deal with larger files, consider reformatting to ext3(with a limit of between 16GB to 2 TB)) or something else.

Hi,
I tried as per your suggestion.The explanation is very good. It worked well for me. Thanks a lot.

try this command.
#dd if=/dev/zero of=/filesize bs=1024 count=xxxx // to create large file.
If this helps you to create expected filesize then filesystem/os does not limits you.

To create this sort of filesize you have to use LFS. becoz bydefault 32bit compilation is able to address at most 2^31 bytes(2GB).
1. open file with O_LARGEFILE flag or’ed with other falgs.
2. compile your code with -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE64 -DLARGEOFFSET_BITS=64

suggestion of converting usb hdd to ext3 format is good. but that format will not be detected in windows xp. so how to come out this problem.

I ran into this, where the apparent limit was 16 GB. To cope with lots of little files, i’d gone out of my way to set up the ext3 filesystem with 1 KB blocks. ext3 with 1 KB blocks limits files to 16 GB. Here’s the schedule:

Ubuntu itself does not have file size limits — It depends what file system you are using the standard is ext3. My drive was under 256GB, so i went with 2 KB blocks.

Filesystem File Size Limit Filesystem Size Limit
ext2/ext3 with 1 KiB blocksize 16448 MiB (

16 GiB) 2048 GiB (= 2 TiB)
ext2/3 with 2 KiB blocksize 256 GiB 8192 GiB (= 8 TiB)
ext2/3 with 4 KiB blocksize 2048 GiB (= 2 TiB) 8192 GiB (= 8 TiB)
ext2/3 with 8 KiB blocksize (Systems with 8 KiB pages like Alpha only) 65568 GiB (

64 TiB) 32768 GiB (= 32 TiB)
ReiserFS 3.5 2 GiB 16384 GiB (= 16 TiB)
ReiserFS 3.6 (as in Linux 2.4) 1 EiB 16384 GiB (= 16 TiB)
XFS 8 EiB 8 EiB
JFS with 512 Bytes blocksize 8 EiB 512 TiB
JFS with 4KiB blocksize 8 EiB 4 PiB
NFSv2 (client side) 2 GiB 8 EiB
NFSv3 (client side) 8 EiB 8 EiB

I love this Q & A stream. I had the file size limit problem and was able to quickly try all the tests proposed here. It is quite clearly a problem with the program I was using. (SoX as it happens.)

Thanks for an excellent diagnosis!

What I’m supposed to do when i got this message(when i’m root and i try to copy a too large file, I suppose) but an empty /etc/security/limits.conf file ? (not really empty, but just some comments)

Thanks I was also facing the same problem I formatted my USB HDD with ext3 fs after it solved my problem Thanks a ton. I have partition my drive into two part one I had formatted with ext3 (space 120 GB) for testing purpose and rest partition I will format with NTFS (with space 190 GB)and will check again whether this problem will solve in NTFS filesystem or not.

what is the entry for root max file size limit to 10 GB?
Thanks in advance.

Hi sir i am configure samba in Linux, sir my problem the Linux server so many clients send and receiving files . sir my problem any user send the data but server limit 1gb, no copy and paste 1GB more…. please tell me my problem.

If you want OS level file max limit. Add this line in the bottom of /etc/sysctl.conf as root

Then load the kernel module ; sysctl -p

Had similar issue, after long day, found what is causing it and it was xdebug.
Issue was caused by this value xdebug.auto_trace=On

thanks Oleg, your tip save me a lot of time…

Simply run “ulimit -f unlimited” and it will set file size to unlimited. No need to go through this ordeal.

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File Size Limit

What is the maximum file size limit in rhel 32 bit OS, is there any OS limitation for the file size , if there is any limitation set then please tell me what will be for root & oaa.

3 Answers 3

File size is limited by filesystem type not by OS. Typically, OS supports several filesystems, so there is no such thing like «OS file size limit». There are limits for well-known filesystems:

Since more than a decade, 32 bit Linux applications are able to access files larger than 2 GiB (2^31) thanks to the implementation of large file support. The current OS limitation is 8 EiB (2^63) which shouldn’t hit the common of us before a while.

You would need a file system that makes no lower limit on file size too.

Large File Support (LFS) is not supported by default on either:

• 32 bit kernels
• 32 bit processes running on 64 bit kernels.

As stated in the following post it should be explicitly enabled in the kernel at compilation time. Otherwise the file size is limited to 2147483647 bytes = 2^31 — 1 (1 byte is probably reserved for the kernel or FS).

If you have a 32 bit RHEL you can quickly verify that with the following command:

If you have a 64 bit RHEL and the process is compiled for 32 bit systems you have the same problem. You can verify that by running the following program:

You need to compile the program as 32 bit executable:

gcc -m32 -Wall -g main.c -o main

Both programs will stop before that the file reaches the size of 3 GB

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limit the maximum size of file in ext4 filesystem

Ext4 has a maximum filesystem size of 1EB and maximum filesize of 16TB.

However is it possible to make the maximum filesize smaller at filesystem level ? For example I wouldn’t like to allow to create files greater than a specified value (e.g. 1MB). How can this be achieved on ext4 ?

If not ext4 then any other modern filesystem has support for such feature ?

2 Answers 2

ext4 has a max_dir_size_kb mount option to limit the size of directories, but no similar option for regular files.

A process however can be prevented from creating a file bigger than a limit using limits as set by setrlimit() or the ulimit or limit builtin of some shells. Most systems will also let you set those limits system-wide, per user.

When a process exceeds that limit, it receives a SIGXFSZ signal. And when it ignores that signal, the operation that would have caused that file size to be exceeded (like a write() or truncate() system call) fails with a EFBIG error.

To move that limit to the file system, one trick you could do is use a fuse (file system in user space) file system, where the user space handler is started with that limit set. bindfs is a good candidate for that.

If you run bindfs dir dir (that is bind dir over itself), with bindfs started as ( zsh syntax):

Then any attempt to create a file bigger than 1M in that dir will fail. bindfs forwards the EFBIG error to the process writing the file.

Note that that limit only applies to regular files, that won’t stop directories to grow past that limit (for instance by creating a large number of files in them).

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How to limit file size on commit?

Is there an option to limit the file size when committing?

For example: file sizes above 500K would produce a warning. File sizes above 10M would stop the commit.

I’m fully aware of this question which technically makes this a duplicate but the answers only offer a solution on push, which would be too late for my requirements.

5 Answers 5

This pre-commit hook will do the file size check:

.git/hooks/pre-commit

Above script must be saved as .git/hooks/pre-commit with execution permissions enabled ( chmod +x .git/hooks/pre-commit ).

The default soft (warning) and hard (error) size limits are set to 500,000 and 10,000,000 bytes but can be overriden through the hooks.filesizesoftlimit and hooks.filesizehardlimit settings respectively:

A shorter, bash-specific version of @Leon’s script, which prints the file sizes in a human-readable format. It requires a newer git for the —diff-filter=d option:

As with the other answers, this must be saved with execute permissions as .git/hooks/pre-commit .

You need to implement eis script you already look for in the pre-commit hook.

From documentation, we learned that pre-commit hook

takes no parameters, and is invoked before obtaining the proposed commit log message and making a commit. Exiting with a non-zero status from this script causes the git commit command to abort before creating a commit.

Basically, the hook is called to check if the user is allowed to commit his changes.

The script originally made by eis on other post becomes

There is a general pre-commit hook. You can write a script to check file size and then accept or reject the commit. Git however gives the user the ability to bypass the check) from the command line type «git help hooks» for more information. Here is the relevant info on the pre-commit hook.

This hook is invoked by git commit, and can be bypassed with —no-verify option. It takes no parameter, and is invoked before obtaining the proposed commit log message and making a commit. Exiting with non-zero status from this script causes the git commit to abort.

Just wanted to comment the solution @Leon provided was awesome. I hit a minor snag where it aborted if a empty directory started to attempt to be tracked. So I had to add

there before the ls-files command to avoid the error.

I would have preferred to post a comment as this is not an answer but I don’t have the reputation points.

Note: I know git ‘ignores’ directories but apparently not before the pre-commit hook is run.

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