tar or cpio, which is better?

[Robert Claeson]

I wrote:

>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.

And in a recent article, sparks at power.viewlogic.com (Alan Sparks)
replied with:

>Which version of cpio are you running?  The cpio man page on the
>Sun here says, "cpio does not support multiple volume tapes."
>(unquote).

I just checked on a SunOS 4.1 system and you're right, SunOS's cpio
doesn't support multi-file cpio archives, and it lacks many of cpio's
flags, such as -m, -C, -I, -O and the like.

The cpio I'm generally using is the one found in, among others,
UNIX System V Release 3.1 and later. It appears that Sun's cpio
comes from some older version of System V, presumably Release 2.

-- 
Robert Claeson                  |Reasonable mailers: rclaeson at erbe.se
ERBE DATA AB                    |      Dumb mailers: rclaeson%erbe.se at sunet.se
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