tar or cpio, which is better?

[KLARICH TERRY JAME]

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
>>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.


I know that cpio will also archive the special and device fines usualy
found in in /dev.  How ever, I think I remember that cpio won't handle
symbolic links properly.  I really don't remember if this was for
everyone's cpio or just one vender's.

-- 
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Terry Klarich <klarich at d.cs.okstate.edu> n5hts