I was tarring a Unix-based application today when I encountered tar's 2GB file size limit. Frankly speaking, I was a bit surprised the application was greater than 2GB because it was only few hundred megabytes a few years ago. Anyway, to get around this annoying limitation, I used the -E option, but it did not work. I realized that I was using a non-standard tar binary because of redefined paths -- per site policy. I specified the absolute path for the OS-based tar command and the tar activity worked fine.

Here is an example.

# /usr/bin/tar -cvfpE GreaterThan2GB.tar /opt/MYAPP