The netkit-ftp client that ships with Redhat Enterprise Linux comes with a verbose option, which will among other things instruct the client to print the number of bytes transferred after each file is successfully sent. These messages look similar to the following:
85811076 bytes sent in 1.3e+02 seconds (6.7e+02 Kbytes/s)
I had several enormous files (each > 2GB) I needed to move to another server, and noticed that the netkit-ftp client wasn’t printing status messages after the files were transferred. To see what was causing the issue, I started reading throught the netkit-ftp source code. After a few minutes of poking around ftp.c, I came across this gem:
void
sendrequest(const char *cmd, char *local, char *remote, int printnames)
{
volatile long bytes = 0
while ((c = read(fileno(fin), buf, sizeof (buf))) > 0) {
printf("Bytes (%ld) is incremented by %dn", bytes, c);
bytes += c;
for (bufp = buf; c > 0; c -= d, bufp += d)
if ((d = write(fileno(dout), bufp, c)) <= 0)
break;
......
}
I reckon the folks who developed this code never transferred files larger than 2^31 bits on 32-bit platforms. After changing bytes (and the code that uses bytes) to use the unsigned long long data type, everything worked as expected. I digs me some opensource!