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Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 21:33:50 +1000
From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Message-Id: <199507211133.VAA31644@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Hmmmm! New error encountered with cpio while building root.flp
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>Why not change the default to the safe "newc"?  cpio is supposed to
>read all formats automagically, and Posix does only standardize pax
>anyway.

POSIX.1 specifies certain tar and cpio formats.  Note that gnu tar
implements the format specified in an early draft of POSIX.1 and handles
the standard format poorly for extraction because it thinks it is
nonstandard.  Gnu cpio implements the POSIX.1 format.  See cpio/README.

The handling of rdevs is mostly implementation-defined.  Zeroing them
for regular files is allowed.

Bruce