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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!pacbell.com!amdahl!hip-hop!dfox From: dfox@hip-hop.suvl.ca.us (David Fox) Subject: Re: any chance of... References: <JKH.93Mar30023319@whisker.lotus.ie> <1993Mar30.041706.28158@coe.montana.edu> <JKH.93Mar30220435@whisker.lotus.ie> Organization: Hip-Hop BBS, Sunnyvale California Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1993 22:47:29 GMT Message-ID: <C4ttz5.3DJ@hip-hop.suvl.ca.us> Lines: 36 jkh@whisker.lotus.ie (Jordan K. Hubbard) wrote: >I thought the primary rational for using cpio was that it was smart enough >to prompt for media change! The few times I tried this with GNU tar >(admittedly last with 1.8), it didn't work. > >Anyone care to comment on whether multiple-floppy distributions are made >easier/harder with cpio over tar? If you have the diskspace to hold the entire cpio or tar archive, either should work, although tar is a bit easier because the compress flag is part of tar and not part of cpio. For going straight to floppies, with little or no intermediate storage, neither is really usable if you want to compress the data on the floppies. cpio won't do it, since it doesn't have a compress flag, and tar might be able to do it, but what happens is that a floppy's worth of data is compressed and stored on the floppy, but _not_ what would fit on a floppy if compressed (which is much more). So you end up writing the same number of floppies. This 'feature' drove me nuts until I found a nice little program called "backflops" on a Linux system. I got the source, compiled it and have been using it ever since for backups (my tape drive is not yet supported). It uses two utilities called 'readmulti' and 'writemulti' to get tar to write a compressed floppy's worth of data. >Jordan Hubbard Lotus Development Ireland jkh@whisker.lotus.ie >386bsd Patchkit Coordinator All-around nice dude. >I do not speak for Lotus as that's not in my job description. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- David E. Fox email: hip-hop!dfox@amdahl.com 5479 Castle Manor Drive San Jose, CA 95129 Thanks for letting me change the magnetic