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From: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.unix.questions,comp.sys.att
Subject: Re: tar or cpio?
Message-ID: <2071@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Date: 10 Feb 88 19:06:41 GMT
References: <246@mancol.UUCP> <1629@cuuxb.ATT.COM> <2506@mibte.UUCP> <41499@sun.uucp>
Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Followup-To: talk.religion.misc
Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana
Lines: 17

In article <41499@sun.uucp> guy@gorodish.Sun.COM (Guy Harris) writes:
>The *correct* thing to do is to make "cpio" detect that the magic number in the
>"cpio" header is byte-swapped from its proper value when reading a tape, and
>automatically decide to swap the bytes in the headers, and *only* the headers,
>as it reads the data.

An even more correct thing to do is for cpio to always write archive headers
in a canonical format that is not dependent on the byte-ordering of the
hardware.  E.g., all header data written least significant byte first.

In other words, portability ought to be achieved by making the cpio *format*
portable, not just by compensating for nonportability in the format (in this
case, ambiguity in byte ordering).

This could well be a matter of religion.  Follow-ups to talk.religion.misc.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!dhesi