tar or cpio, which is better?

[Bob McGowen x4312 dept208]

In article <1990Nov12.095657.22489 at erbe.se> prc at erbe.se (Robert Claeson) writes:
>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
...11 deleted lines...
>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.
>

cpio will also backup device files where tar will not.  This means
named pipes such as SysV UNIX's use for lpsched and cron interprocess
communication.  I do not know if this is a problem for the operation
of these two programs, however.

Bob McGowan  (standard disclaimer, these are my own ...)
Product Support, Wyse Technology, San Jose, CA
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