cpio of AT&T Source Tape under 4.3bsd

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <219 at loligo.cc.fsu.edu> nall at nu.cs.fsu.edu (John Nall) writes:
>We have never had a need to acess our source code tape
>from AT&T, although we have had it for awhile.  Now that
>the need has come up, there seems to be a phase error in
>reading it using 4.3bsd.  Apparently the way AT&T writes
>their tape is incompatible with the way cpio works under
>4.3bsd.

I don't think 4.3BSD even HAS a "cpio" utility.

In any event, you don't say exactly which release of what AT&T software
you're having problems with, which makes it difficult to give a simple
answer.  Many earlier releases of UNIX System V, also UNIX System III,
were written in the default machine-specific binary cpio format rather
than the "portable ASCII header" format used for recent releases.  If
you have a tape written in binary cpio format from a machine of opposite
"Endianness", it is unreadable by a stock "cpio" utility on your system.
This is typically reported as "out of phase -- get help" or some other
such useless diagnostic.

Most AT&T cpio tapes use 5120-byte blocking, for which you must specify
the -B option when reading via cpio.  In case it's a "portable ASCII
header" format tape, you also need to specify the -c option.  Also note
that some older releases were actually multi-file tapes, with each tape
file being a separate cpio archive, and on the binary distribution tapes
some of the tape files are just executable binaries or raw disk images.