ext3 file system tweaks

One of my student asked me if he could create a file larger than 2GB on an ext3 file system. Thus started my research and it was pretty easy. While creating the file system specify the block size and that would do the trick. The table below shows the maximum file size for different block size.

Now to create the file system use mke2fs.

mke2fs -j -b 2048 /dev/sda5

the above example creates a ext3 file system with block size 2kb (specified in bytes) on the /dev/sda5 partition.