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From: guy@gorodish.Sun.COM (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,comp.sys.att
Subject: Re: tar or cpio?
Message-ID: <41623@sun.uucp>
Date: 11 Feb 88 06:04:39 GMT
References: <246@mancol.UUCP> <1629@cuuxb.ATT.COM> <2506@mibte.UUCP> <2071@bsu-cs.UUCP>
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> 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).

There is already such a "cpio" format.  Presumably, it's not the default for
reasons of backwards compatibility.  The correct thing to do *WITH OLD "cpio"
FORMAT FILES* is to attempt to figure out the byte order from the header and
translate it; yes, there ARE old "cpio" format files out there, and yes,
sometimes you have to read them on machines with a different byte order.