In the admin guide, under the section "Large Databases" is the
following paragraph:
Since Postgres allows tables larger than the maximum file size
on your system, it can be problematic to dump the table to a
file, since the resulting file will likely be larger than the
maximum size allowed by your system. As pg_dump writes to the
standard output, you can just use standard *nix tools to work
around this possible problem.
This is a generalization of, most likely, a failing in linux.
NetBSD (which I use) will allow file sizes up to 2^64 -- I don't think
anyone has generated a postgresql database that large yet.
You might want to qualify that with "Operating systems which support
64-bit file sizes (such as NetBSD) will have no problem with large
databases" or "some operating systems are limited to 2-gigabyte files
(such as linux)"
--Michael
