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From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.de>
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Subject: Re: cpio truncating inode numbers?
In-Reply-To: <199612200345.NAA01692@nanguo.chalmers.com.au> from Robert Chalmers at "Dec 20, 96 01:45:44 pm"
To: robert@nanguo.chalmers.com.au (Robert Chalmers)
Date: Thu, 26 Dec 1996 03:40:12 +0100 (MET)
Cc: questions@FreeBSD.org (FreeBSD Questions)
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Robert Chalmers writes:
> Hi,
> Does anyone know what this message means in cpio,
>
>  cpio: xxxxx filename being backed up : truncating inode number
>
>
> It this a disaster, or do I ignor it?  tar seems to work ok, but
> not cpio, if that is acutally an error.

It's not a disaster, it's a historical quirk.  The cpio format has
only 2 bytes for the inode number (the inode is the real file
description; the file names in the directories just point to the
inode).  I've forgotten why it's there in the first place, and since
inodes have gone to 4 bytes, any large disk will have lots of inode
numbers which won't fit in two bytes.  You don't need the inode number
when restoring the files, so you don't need to worry (but it sure is a
nuisance :-)  You're probably better off using tar.

Greg