Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!munnari.oz.au!bruce!labtam!scott
From: scott@labtam.oz (Scott Colwell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: SR10 - CPIO-bug ?!?
Message-ID: <4962@labtam.oz>
Date: 9 Jul 90 01:43:48 GMT
References: <9007061312.AA14671@richter.mit.edu>
Organization: Labtam Limited., Melbourne, Australia
Lines: 36

krowitz%richter@UMIX.CC.UMICH.EDU (David Krowitz) writes:
>You've got yourself a real problem ... 

Like David said..  There however are two seperate problems (at least :-)
in using cpio on Mentor files, the first is that cpio does not seem to
understand Apollo file types and the second is that Mentor uses symbolic links
strangely to handle file versions.

Why doesn't the manual entry for cpio say that it can't handle other than
unstruct files ?  It either should handle all files or be documented to
not handle them (and preferably warn you too.)

Mentor creates files as shown below:
$ ls -S
sheet1.pic	-> $23
sheet1.pic_$22
sheet1.pic_$23

where 'sheet1.pic_$23' is the current version and 'sheet1.pic_$22' is the
previous version. The link 'sheet1.pic' is used to figure out which is the
current version. Note that the symbolic link actually points to '$23' not
'sheet1.pic_$23'. Cpio when it tries to archive 'sheet1.pic', it can't get
any information on the file (maybe it tries to stat the file?), and prints
an error message.

I would prefer to use cpio rather than wbak/rbak for a number of reasons
but have given up. At least wbak and rbak can use stdin and stdout now
rather than being fixed to a device so that you can backup over the network
to a larger QIC tape (QIC-150) or to an exabyte on one of our other machines.

(Looking forward to the day when I can have Mentor on real unix :-)

-- 
Scott Colwell
Labtam Information Systems P/L	net:	scott@labtam.oz.au
Melbourne, Australia 		phone:	+61-3-587-1444