Talk:Cpio

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curious: how does cpio differ from tar or shar and why might it be preferable? Derex @ 20:55, 8 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Many versions of the tar utility, especially on legacy systems, only support a single archive format. The GNU cpio utility (and, typically, other cpio implementations), supports multiple archive formats. One of them, usually referred to as POSIX tar is actually compatible with existing tar utilities, so one can use:

$ find dir/ | cpio -o -H ustar > dir.tar
$ tar tvf dir.tar | more

So, in a sence, cpio provides a superset of the functionality of tar.

It's worth noting though that many modern tar implementations support a variety of formats too, i.e. the tar(1) utility of recent FreeBSD versions, so this distinction has started to blur and/or fade away a bit.

Other important differences include:

• cpio uses stdin to read the list of files to archive, making it easy to exclude certain patterns of files by grepping them out, making concatenation of file lists easy, etc.
• cpio has a pass-through mode, which wasn't available in early tar versions
• more...

— Keramida 18:19, 10 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

CPIO is really this article, isn't it? 129.241.158.188 21:34, 12 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Since the name of the program is cpio, the CPIO article should be merged into this one, not the other way around. 83.71.47.204 22:39, 23 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sure thing. I made the mess, I'll clean it up. I've got a few things to sort out so I'll check back in 24 hours and merge the articles if no one has any objections.

Another point to note is that the name of the archiving application is "Cpio" whereas it's only the extension of an archive that is lowercase (Even then it might not always be the case.) I'm unsure if a lowercase title is really necessary in this article after merging. The CPIO article refers mostly to the application which starts with a capital, so after the merge, the case "Cpio" is more valid. :-)

Techtoucian 11:00, 25 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Probably, it would be a nice idea to make a disambiguation page for C3po :) It really will... --Yuriy

Curious, does cpio still have the 8GB limit? I have made some fairly large archives that I believe exdeeded 8GB.

--S

cpio uses the old binary format by default (for compatibility) which has some limitations including architecture dependence. Several versions of cpio support newer formats which are portable between architectures and have higher limits. [1] and personal experience suggests that limits of the original cpio are pretty limited.

In its place, I suggest the use of afio (http://freshmeat.net/projects/afio/), an improved version of cpio.

afio versions 2.4.8 and above have their own file format (referenced in the man page as "Large ASCII" which has much higher if not arbitrary limits. I have used it against archives of overall size within hundreds of gigabytes, containing over 750,000 files some exceeding 4 gigabytes in size.

afio uses the old cpio format be default if possible for compatibility; but, it will revert to the more capable format if (from the afio man page):

• A file has a size of larger the 2GB
• The archive contains more than 64K files which ahve hard links
• A file, directory, or special file has a UID or GID value larger than 65535

Plus, afio compresses or encrypts single files so small corruptions are not likely to prevent restoration of more then a single file. Note that both cpio and afio were designed as backup utilities rather then archive utilities such as tar. Their file format was never designed as an interchange format.

Tim Harig (http://ilthio.net)

Commnad "cpio -l" doesn't work 78.60.37.58 (talk) 16:10, 22 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Those examples are shitty enough that they probably came from a GNU info page. Do we have an example that's the equivalent of, for instance, 'tar xf'? 74.78.117.93 (talk) 20:33, 28 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The equivalent of 'tar xf' is 'cpio -i -d -m' (BSD cpio) or 'cpio -i --make-directories --preserve-modification-time --no-absolute-filenames' (GNU cpio).

Professor Tournesol (talk) 02:36, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

% find . -depth -print | cpio -ov > tree.cpio

Seems to me that cpio is going to include the destination file (at least part of it) in itself with this command. —Preceding unsigned comment added by P4p4 n0eL (talk • contribs) 01:50, 11 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Cpgz redirects to this article, which doesn't mention "cpgz". -- Hoary (talk) 02:02, 23 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The article used to say this: "Like the tar format, cpio archives are often compressed using gzip and distributed as .cpgz (or .cpio.gz) files." (See the revision of the article from 2011-10-12T16:11:24.) That sentence apparently was lost in a rewrite. – Tea2min (talk) 09:29, 23 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

And is it worth mentioning that this is associated with an initial ram file system on some flavors of linux?

as seen here: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/24029

How to unpack and repack an initial ramdisk (initrd/initramfs) image? ... Then uncompress and extract the initrd: Raw

1. zcat /boot/initrd-2.6.18-164.6.1.el5.img | cpio -idmv

... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.198.94.50 (talk) 01:37, 18 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]