It's not arbitrary. It's simply the largest int pointer your emacs can represent. It's also a non-problem on 64-bit machines. Run the following code in your

It's not arbitrary. It's simply the largest int pointer your emacs can represent. It's also a non-problem on 64-bit machines. Run the following code in your emacs buffer: (let ((i 1024)) (while (> i 0) (setq i (* i 2))) (1- i)) The number it returns is your max file size. Mine is 1152921504606846975 bytes.