Re: Why do Informix Products ship with TAR and not CPIO?

Jonathan Leffler wrote: } These days, the biggest factor is whether you can list all the files for } the product on the command line or not. } } As someone else noted, tar is easier to use if you simply want to copy } everything underneath some directory to tape. However, the way the Unix } distribution phase works means that all the files for a number of products } are copied to a work area, and then different subsets of these files are } copied onto the tape image. To achieve that with tar, you have to list the } files (but not the directories) one by one on the command line. Until the } advent of GLS, you could usually get away with doing that. With the advent } of GLS, the file lists have grown humongously long and it is no longer very } sensible to try it -- it certainly isn't as portable as cpio with the -c } option. By contrast, cpio reads its file list from its standard input, so } it does not run into problems with the size of the argument list. So, } nowadays, you will generally find that the software is released with cpio } archives. I have used the 'F' option of tar for many years to accomplish this task. I place a list of files that I want to tar into a temporary file, and run a command similar to this: tar cvF file-list Every file listed in the file (called 'file-list' in this example) is then written to tape. This works for both absolute and relative pathnames. Tim