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From: adrie@philica.ica.philips.nl (Adrie Koolen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Cpio vs. Tar
Keywords: which is better?
Message-ID: <653@philica.ica.philips.nl>
Date: 27 Aug 90 11:25:35 GMT
References: <2627@unccvax.uncc.edu>
Reply-To: adrie@beitel.ica.philips.nl (Adrie Koolen)
Organization: Philips TDS, Innovation Centre Aachen
Lines: 20

In article <2627@unccvax.uncc.edu> cs00chs@unccvax.uncc.edu (charles spell) writes:
>I noticed that cpio produces much larger archive files than tar.
>
>What would be some advantages of using cpio instead of tar?

That's strange. Tar uses very inefficient and large headers. While archiving
half of the command sources, tar produced a file of 627KB, but the cpio
generated file was 584KB. No so much smaller, but at least not larger than
the tar file! The commands, which I archived, were rather large files, so
I tried to archive all the C sources in lib/other. Tar produced a file of
152KB, cpio a file of 112KB. The directory contained 58 files, most of which
were under 1KB. I used `ls *.c | cpio -ocvB >lib.cpio' to generate the cpio
file. When not using the `c' and the `B' options, the cpio file was only
107KB.

I don't understand how you got a cpio file, that was significantly larger
than the corresponding tar file. What sort of files did you archive?

Adrie Koolen (adrie@ica.philips.nl)
Philips Innovation Centre Aachen