problem with reading source distribution tapes

[gwyn at brl-smoke.UUCP]

In article <128 at ryesone.UUCP> mason at ryesone.UUCP (Dave Mason) writes:
>We have a standard university license for Unix, have the source tape,
>and then were given/sold an IBM Series/1 Interactive Executive, a basically
>SysV post with Berkley tty handlers (and completely mangled manuals) which
>is a binary port.  I want to get some of the sources off our tape, which I
>understood to be in cpio format, but cpio wants nothing to do with it, nor
>does tar.  I have taken a quick look at it with od, and it looks vaguely
>like a cpio format.  Any suggestions?

Remember that there are really two CPIO formats:
	(1) binary headers, therefore machine-dependent format
	(2) ASCII headers, therefore portable format
If your tape is the latter, you need to add the letter "c" to the
list of "cpio" options in order to read it.  If your tape is the
former, it must be read on a machine with similar binary architecture
(unless you want to hack up a special version of "cpio") without using
the "c" option.

One final note: really old versions of CPIO did not support ASCII
headers.