I got bored and reverse engineered how SCO #cpio is able to store such large files in their archives when the newc format only officially supports 4GiB file entries.

I am not a coder, so I just made some files with cpio from the Heirloom Toolset and looked at them in hexdump.

#rpm packages use #newc for payload and have the same 4 GiB individual limit. Maybe they should adopt this extension. The they can have up to 9 EiB entries, which should be good enough. 🤪

https://gist.github.com/ruario/b02c762c95d6521d5df4f798cd795318