Per Jessen said the following on 09/10/2009 10:30 AM:
Randall R Schulz wrote:
TAR also permits more compressions schemes (in fact, beyond the ones it will invoke itself based on options like 'j' or 'z', it can run arbitrary external compression commands if you wish).
Or just feed the output from cpio through your favourite compressor.
I find cpio very useful for some things, particularly when I have file names in a file or from stdin. The output can be made tar-compatible.
Historically, CPIO could handle device i-nodes whereas TAR couldn't. Does this still hold? And as for the compression, is the code or that actually in the TAR binary or does it pipe through an external command? All to often I find that I want to backup _some_ of a directory tree, not all of it, such as the RCS files but not the originals. Using 'find' or the like is wonderful for this. But then again, my regualr backup is disk-to-disk-to-offline with the first part being done with 'rsync' or perhaps even a LVM copy. -- Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later. - Og Mandino -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org