On Mon, 29 Mar 2004 21:00, Jim Cheetham wrote: > On Mar 29, 2004, at 8:50 PM, Christopher Sawtell wrote: > > Put both disks in the same machine and use cpio to move the data. > > > > man cpio > > cpio --help > > cpio is a dreadful holdover from sys V unix, iirc ... the syntax is > horrible, and there are absolutely no benefits over tar (not least > originally because each Unix vendor used a different internal cpio > format ...).
The big advantage of cpio over tar is that the names of the files to be placed in the archive are input to cpio's stdin. You can therefore use whatever file selection algorithm is appropriate for the task at hand. In contrast, afaik, tar can only copy directory trees. cpio also can cope with endianism and half-word re-ordering. cpio therefore makes an ideal transport method to move data between machines of different architectures. The archive stream created by cpio comes out of its stdout. Thus it can be used conveniently as the input to a pipe. Whilst the traditional cpio implementations did indeed have a somewhat baroque option and flag structure, the modern GNU implementation uses --long options and is not only really quite understandable but also comprehensive. > If the disks are on the same machine (which is doubtful because one of > the machines is a laptop) then dd would be interesting (vide an earlier > discussion on the list), or tar would be normal. Unless I'm totally mistaken, there is no mention of one of the machines being a lappie in the original posting. -- Sincerely etc. Christopher Sawtell NB. This PC runs Linux. If you find a virus apparently from me, it has forged the e-mail headers on someone else's machine. Please do not notify me when this occurs. Thanks.
