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38.13. The cpio Tape Archiver

There was a time when people used to debate whether BSD tar (Section 38.2, Section 39.2) (tape archiver) or System V cpio (copy in/out) was the better file archive and backup program. At this point, though, no one ships out cpio archives over the Net (Section 1.21). tar is widespread, and there are free versions available, including GNU tar (Section 39.3).

There's still a good reason to use cpio: it's better at recovering backups from partially damaged media. If a block of your tape or disk archive goes bad, cpio can probably recover all files except the one with the bad block. A tar archive may not fare as well. Though we don't give it much air time in this book, here are a few cpio basics:

There are lots of other options for things like resetting file access times or ownership or changing the blocking factor on the tape. See your friendly neighborhood manual page for details. Notice that options are typically "squashed together" into an option string rather than written out as separate options.

--TOR and JP



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