*BSD News Article 3320


Return to BSD News archive

Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!uunet!usc!sdd.hp.com!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ames!sgi!rigden.wpd.sgi.com!rpw3
From: rpw3@rigden.wpd.sgi.com (Rob Warnock)
Subject: Re: Reading 386bsd dist files (bin,src,etc)
Message-ID: <oa6un94@sgi.sgi.com>
Sender: rpw3@rigden.wpd.sgi.com
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.  Mountain View, CA
Date: Sat, 8 Aug 1992 07:01:02 GMT
Lines: 26

tgt@neon.ecn.purdue.edu (Conan the Librarian) writes:
+---------------
| Attempting to use cpio to extract the files in the various 386bsd dists,
| I ran into a byte swapping problem (running on both a Gould and a SUN3).
| ...couldn't find any flag to massage cpio into appropriate behavior on the
| Gould or the SUN (so much for archive portability). I wrote the following
| program to do the necessary header "fix" (26 shorts in each cpio header
| need to be byte-swapped)...
+---------------

I started to do the same thing, but found it much easier to simply ignore
the native cpio completely, and snarf the Net-2 cpio.c and compile & run
*that* on my cross-host (an SGI 4D/35, BigEndian like the Sun-3). The Net-2
(and 386bsd) version will run on either Endian-ness machine and extract
from archives written on either Endian-ness. [And it's faster than piping
through a converter.]


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock, MS-9U/510		rpw3@sgi.com
Silicon Graphics, Inc.		(415)390-1673
2011 N. Shoreline Blvd.
Mountain View, CA  94043