Fair point by David Boyce:

-- 
    Daniel Stenberg -- http://curl.haxx.se/ -- http://daniel.haxx.se/
   [[ Do not send mails to this email address. They won't reach me. ]]
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 09:48:32 -0500
From: David Boyce
Subject: Re: FTP large file support patch
>Technically, we don't know that this type is 64bit and that's why _BIG is
>better in my opinion.
Daniel,
I can't respond to the list since I'm not a subscriber (I read you via
gmane.org) so am going straight to you. IMHO, _LARGE would serve you better
than _BIG since >2GB files are known technically as "large files". If I
understand correctly the standard interfaces were agreed to in a conference
known as the "Large File Summit". A Google search turns up this:
>This 2Gb limit was common for UNIX on 32-bit. At some point a number of
>UNIX vendors (well, some engineers from the major UNIX vendors and some
>major database and other applications vendors) got together and held a
>"summit" to discuss some way to overcome this limitation and to agree on a
>reasonably portable interface so that the ISV (the independent software
>vendors) could write reasonably portable code to cope with this change. So
>the specification that they agreed upon has been called the LFS ("large
>file summit" or "large file support").
And the name persists. E.g. on Solaris 9:
% man largefile | head -40
NAME
      largefile - large file status of utilities
DESCRIPTION
      A large file is a regular file whose size is greater than or
      equal to 2 Gbyte ( 2**31 bytes). A small file is a regular file
      whose size is less than 2 Gbyte.
Therefore, while I agree with the previous poster that names like "big" are
overly general, "large" at least has a specific connotation. Note that the
definition of large is any file bigger than 2GB, not merely one whose
offsets must fit within a 64-bit pointer.
-David Boyce
-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials.
Become an expert in LINUX or just sharpen your skills.  Sign up for IBM's
Free Linux Tutorials.  Learn everything from the bash shell to sys admin.
Click now! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1278&alloc_id=3371&op=click