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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!uunet!auspex-gw!guy From: guy@Auspex.COM (Guy Harris) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: Reading 386bsd dist files (bin,src,etc) Message-ID: <14185@auspex-gw.auspex.com> Date: 20 Aug 92 21:31:15 GMT References: <oa6un94@sgi.sgi.com> Sender: news@auspex-gw.auspex.com Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara Lines: 19 Nntp-Posting-Host: auspex.auspex.com >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.] Yup; that's the code I put into the SunOS 3.2 "cpio" (when somebody who'd just joined Sun tried to read a "cpio" tape of his home directory at his previous job, which was written in non-"-c" form on a VAX, and found that somebody at AT&T's royally screwed the pooch, and rendered the byte-swapping options completely useless for reading such tapes). Any vendor with an SVR3-vintage "cpio" in their UNIX should pick up those changes; they include stuff to automatically figure out the byte order for non-"-c" tapes, and to support symlinks (although there's a bug in that code, and you should pick up the fix in a recent posting I made here). (It also includes changes to keep it from printing "errno" numeric values in its error messages.)