Improve interaction with transfers >4GB files to a vfat filesystem

[jose1711]

Dealing with slow, FAT-formatted USB drives can be particularly frustrating when, after enduring several minutes of waiting, one encounters a "Write to destination file failed" error for files larger than 4 GB. There are circumstances when a partially transferred file is acceptable or even desirable but many times this is not the case.
To improve the user experience vifm could give a list of option before the transfer is initiated:

• accept this partial transfer (only shown for copy operation)
• accept this and all following partial transfers (only shown for copy operation)
• skip this file transfer (i. e. do not transfer the file)
• skip this and all following files >4 GB
• split the file by means of split utility
• abort the whole operation

[xaizek]

Was worried that there is no way to know maximum file size, but getconf FILESIZEBITS . does that more or less accurately.

With the exception of split it can work when 'syscalls' is set. When 'syscalls' is unset, cp might be used for copying files recursively and thus size handling won't be available even for copying individual files for consistency.

However, there are file-systems with copy-on-write and moving across file-systems is generally copy followed by a remove (not sure about moving between BTRFS subvolumes), this can make it more complicated.

[jose1711]

However, there are file-systems with copy-on-write and moving across file-systems is generally copy followed by a remove (not sure about moving between BTRFS subvolumes), this can make it more complicated.

That is the very reason why I mentioned vfat specifically. For me this would cover 100 % of issues of type "d'oh - should've checked the filesize first" (btw BTRFS limit of file size is 16 EiB).