[ale] CPIO!

[James CE Johnson]

Dow Hurst wrote:

>Why not alias "txj" to 'tar xf - | bzip2' and use that?  Just do the
>alias in /etc/profile or /etc/cshrc so all your shells inherit it.
>
Can a bzip2 archive recover from corruption somewhere in the middle? 
 I'm pretty sure gzip can't.  I suppose if it does a block-wise 
compression where each block is independent of the preceeding blocks 
then you could recover.

The only point I was trying to make is that if you compress your entire 
archive and your decompressor can't recover if there is mid-stream 
corruption then your entire archive is lost.  If you compress each file 
individually and your archiver can recover from mid-stream corruption 
then you only loose those files "under" the corruption.

Someone made an earlier comment about the history of tar vs cpio.  I 
just ran across this in the tar info page:


     If anyone knows why `cpio' was made when `tar' was present at the
     unix scene,

   It wasn't.  `cpio' first showed up in PWB/UNIX 1.0; no
generally-available version of UNIX had `tar' at the time.  I don't
know whether any version that was generally available _within AT&T_ had
`tar', or, if so, whether the people within AT&T who did `cpio' knew
about it.

   On restore, if there is a corruption on a tape `tar' will stop at
that point, while `cpio' will skip over it and try to restore the rest
of the files.

>
>Dow
>
>Stuffed Crust wrote:
>
>>On Thu, Jun 14, 2001 at 04:54:52PM -0400, James CE Johnson wrote:
>>
>>>Now if someone would fix tar such that 'tar xz' is something other than
>>>'tar xf - | gzip', that would be great.
>>>
>>um, like 'tar xj; is equivalent to 'tar xf - | bzip2'?
>>
>> - Pizza
>>--
>>Solomon Peachy                                    pizzaATfucktheusers.org
>>I ain't broke, but I'm badly bent.                           ICQ# 1318344
>>Patience comes to those who wait.
>>    ...It's not "Beanbag Love", it's a "Transanimate Relationship"...
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>



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