I think you found a bug in perl. The length parameter is being treated as an unsigned integer (UV), but is being stored as a signed integer (IV). (Or is it the other way around?). In any case, any attempt to specify a length of greater than 2**31-1 results in the "Negative length" error. (Tested on AS811 and AS817 under XP): 

[0] Perl> open I, '<:raw', '32GB.dat.bz2';;
[0] Perl> read( I, $c, 2147483648 );;
[Negative length at (eval 4) line 1, <STDIN> line 2.
] Perl> read( I, $c, 2147483647 );;

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In reply to Re: File splitting script by BrowserUk
in thread File splitting script by Alien

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