tar or cpio, which is better?

[Robert Claeson]

In a recent article tim at comcon.UUCP (Tim Brown) writes, on tar vs. cpio:

>Tar seems more portable.  I did some archives on a system running
>ISC2.2 and could not read them on an Risc 6000/AIX machine.  I suspect
>that if I had remembered to use the  -c option it would have worked
>but tar works fine as is.

The man page for cpio says that the -c option always should be used
for creating archives that should be transferred to other machines.
I believe that POSIX's cpio defaults to the -c option.

I've run into cases where a machine refused to read my tar files.
Using cpio instead worked just fine. Also, for backup purposes,
cpio is probably the best. It comes *standard* with the ability to
detect end-of-tape and create multi-volume archives. It has better
support for incremental backups and selective restores. And it supports
longer paths than tar's limit of 100 characters.

-- 
Robert Claeson                  |Reasonable mailers: rclaeson at erbe.se
ERBE DATA AB                    |      Dumb mailers: rclaeson%erbe.se at sunet.se
Jakobsberg, Sweden              |  Perverse mailers: rclaeson%erbe.se at encore.com
Any opinions expressed herein definitely belongs to me and not to my employer.