cpio

Documentation

Overview

cpio operates on cpio files using a cpio package It only implements basic cpio options.

Synopsis:

cpio

Description:

Options:

o: output an archive to stdout given a pattern
i: output files from a stdin stream
t: print table of contents
-v: debug prints

Bugs: in i mode, it can't use non-seekable stdin, i.e. a pipe. Yep, this sucks. But if we implement seek on such things, we have to do it by reading, which really sucks. It's doable, we'll do it if we have to, but for now I'd like to avoid the complexity. cpio is a 40 year old concept. If you want something better, see ../archive which has a VTOC and separates data from metadata (unlike cpio). We could test for ESPIPE and fix it that way ... later.