On Thu, 2003-05-29 at 11:26, Rohit wrote:
Hi,
I have been using tar/pkzip/winzip etc all my life. What is cpio? I see the man page and I fail to visualise the situations in which I might end up needing cpio.
cpio is more robust than tar, i.e. it is easier to recover from an error in the archive. I tend to use cpio when I want to copy the contents of a directory structure from one place to another and keep all ownership and permissions intact on the files and directories copied. Example: /home is getting full, you have a new partition ready. mounted on /mnt where all the data is being copied to. cd /home ; find . | cpio -pdumvB /mnt When command completes, you have a perfect copy of /home in /mnt.
Can a user please throw some light on it?
man page should give some idea about what cpio is capable of. If that is
not enough, a few searches on google should give more details. cpio is
frequently used for backing systems up to tape, like tar, dump and
backup is.
HTH,
--
Anders Karlsson