Re: Export directly to tape

What is everone's fascination with tar? It is an archaic utility. cpio is far superior, has at least some error checking and is ultimately far more reliable. I don't know how many situations I have gone into and found that tar is being used for backups (many of which couldn't be used for recovery due to media failure) and had them convert to cpio. I have never known of any situation where tar has any advantage over cpio. Granted, my experience has been limited to SVR4 and BSD types of unix and perhaps there are versions of unix which do not support advanced utilities such as cpio, but I have yet to be convinced that tar can ever be preferred over cpio as long as inter-machine portability is not an issue.

Ken

Markus Korn wrote:

> A named pipe should help:
>
> 1) make the named pipe:
> mknod exportPipe p
> 2) start a backround job which reads the pipe and tarīs the output to
> tape
> tar "options" < exportPipe &
> 3) Start the input into the pipe
> exp userid=system/manager full=y file=exportPipe
>
> Note: you can also do a zip or compress with the same pipe!
>
>
Received on Fri Jun 25 1999 - 07:30:44 CDT