On Mon, 2004-03-29 at 21:44, Christopher Sawtell wrote: > On Mon, 29 Mar 2004 21:00, Jim Cheetham wrote: > > cpio is a dreadful holdover from sys V unix, iirc ... the syntax is > > horrible, and there are absolutely no benefits over tar (not least
> 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. Granted. It's been so long since I've dealt with incompatible cross-platform issues that I'd edited them from my memory ... And the other points you make are true, but don't move me. tar has become the canonical distribution archive, so proficiency with tar is pretty much required. cpio seems by your description to still have valid usages in areas that tar cannot be used, but that's still no excuse to promote it over tar! Especially to someone who wasn't asking about cross-architecture transfers! :-) > Unless I'm totally mistaken, there is no mention of one of the machines being > a lappie in the original posting. Indeed - somewhere along the line I invented that idea in an earlier posting of mine, it doesn't appear to be the case re-reading Hamish's original posting ... he's moving data between a server and a desktop. -jim
