topic Re: cpio vs tar in Operating System - Linux

cpio vs tar

romano r — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:08:33 GMT

hello,
I need to replicate several directories of a NFS files system coming from a SFU NAS file server.

The destination machine is RHEL4.
I mounted both files systems (source and destination) on a HPUX 11i machine.
I tried to use cpio (as I'm used in the UX-UX transfer) like this:
find . -depth -print |cpio -pdum /aaa/xfer/

but it returns errors with sym links.

I tried to use tar like this (as suggested by the man page):
tar cvf - . |( cd /aaa/xfer/ ; tar tvf - )

and it seems working fine even if slower than cpio.

So my idea is to use tar.
Someone knows if tar is not suitable for this pourpose or some other reason to prefer cpio.

I avoided to mount directly the source file system on a RHEL4 machine because the GNU cpio does not recognize the SFU as a native UX file system and returns more errors.

thank you
Kind Regards
Romano

Re: cpio vs tar

Steven Schweda — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:57:11 GMT

I'd expect "tar" to work fine, for some
values of "tar". The native HP-UX "tar"
program may have trouble with long names, for
example, so "pax" or GNU "tar" might be more
suitable.

> The destination machine is RHEL4.

Why drag the HP-UX system into the picture?

> [...] because the GNU cpio does not [...]

But if you use NFS on the Linux system, ...?

Re: cpio vs tar

Jeeshan — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:25:55 GMT

check out this link

http://rightsock.com/~kjw/Ramblings/tar_v_cpio.html