Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!ho95e!wcs
From: wcs@ho95e.ATT.COM (Bill.Stewart)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: tar or cpio?
Message-ID: <1999@ho95e.ATT.COM>
Date: 25 Feb 88 03:03:39 GMT
References: <246@mancol.UUCP> <1629@cuuxb.ATT.COM> <2506@mibte.UUCP> <41499@sun.uucp> <2071@bsu-cs.UUCP> <699@mcdsun.UUCP>
Reply-To: wcs@ho95e.UUCP (46323-Bill.Stewart,2G218,x0705,)
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs 46133, Holmdel, NJ
Lines: 16

In article <699@mcdsun.UUCP> fnf@mcdsun.UUCP (Fred Fish) writes:
:In article <2071@bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
:>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.
	The cpio -c format uses an ascii character representation for the
	headers, which is transparent across byte orders.  It's
	unfortunately not the default, but if you always use it you won't
	get burned.  Unfortunately, cpio also doesn't detect -c format when
	reading, though I think the PD cpio-replacement program afio does.

	Of course, this can't tell you what to do with your *data*, but
	that's at a level transparent to cpio and tar.
-- 
#				Thanks;
# Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs 2G218, Holmdel NJ 1-201-949-0705 ihnp4!ho95c!wcs