It's incredible to me that in 2011, programming languages still have problems with files larger than 2GB in size. We've had files that size for years, and yet overflow problems in this arena still persist. At work, I ran into this problem trying to get the file size of very large files (between 3 and 4 GB in size). The typical filesize() call, as shown below, would return an overflowed result on a very large file:

$size = filesize($someLargeFile);

Because PHP uses signed 32-bit integers to represent some file function return types, and because a 64-bit version of PHP is not officially available, you have to resort to farming the job out to the OS. In Windows, the most elegant way I've found so far is to use a COM object:

$fsobj = new COM("Scripting.FileSystemObject");
$f = $fsobj->GetFile($file);
$size = $file->Size;

Uglier hacks involve capturing the output of the dir command from the command line. There are two bug reports filed on this very issue: 27792 and 34750. The newest of these was filed in late 2005; a little more than 5 years ago! It's sad to see a language as prolific as PHP struggling with a problem so basic. Perhaps this issue will finally get fixed in PHP 6.