Ext3 users - Jul 2002 - 1395 byte file appears as 70 Terabyte file on ext3 HELP!

Looking for ext2 & ext3 expert.   This problem is on a ext3 partition.

I have a small file (1395 bytes) that appears HUGE when runing ls -l 
(70368744179059 bytes).  This causes a problem because tar wants to back 
up all those extra  bytes.
[root@secure parse]# ls -l HTMLFrameSet.class
-rw-rw-r--    1 root    devel    70368744179059 Mar 20 09:05 
HTMLFrameSet.class

[root@secure parse]# wc HTMLFrameSet.class
     15      58    1395 HTMLFrameSet.class

We have back ups of the file else where, but I'm afraid to delete it.  
When I remove it what is going to happen to the file system? Kernal 
version is 2.4.18 on i686  Is it safe to delete and recreate the file. 
 Do I need to unmount the FS and run fsck?


FYI error message from tar:
tar: HTMLFrameSet.class: File shrank by 70368744169331 bytes; padding 
with zeros

No wonder my backups didn't finish :-) !!!!

Thanks for any insight.

On Jul 12, 2002  09:15 -0400, P. Brewer wrote:
> Looking for ext2 & ext3 expert.   This problem is on a ext3 partition.
> 
> I have a small file (1395 bytes) that appears HUGE when runing ls -l 
> (70368744179059 bytes).  This causes a problem because tar wants to back 
> up all those extra  bytes.
> [root@secure parse]# ls -l HTMLFrameSet.class
> -rw-rw-r--    1 root    devel    70368744179059 Mar 20 09:05 
> HTMLFrameSet.class
It looks like you had some memory corruption when this file was written,
so something was put into the high 32 bits of the file size.  The value
70368744179059 is 0x400000000573, so 1395 plus a single bit set way up
in the top of the high 32 bits of the file size.
> [root@secure parse]# wc HTMLFrameSet.class
>     15      58    1395 HTMLFrameSet.class
> 
> We have back ups of the file else where, but I'm afraid to delete it.  
> When I remove it what is going to happen to the file system? Kernal 
> version is 2.4.18 on i686  Is it safe to delete and recreate the file. 
> Do I need to unmount the FS and run fsck?
You can just delete the file and re-create it and all should be well.
I would strongly suggest running memtest86 for 12-24 hours on this
system to verify that your memory is correct.  Other possibilities
include cable errors.

Running e2fsck will not "fix" this, since technically it is legal to
have a file size much larger than the actual amount of data on disk.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/