Tape trivia (was Re: SCO/mountain streamer)

[Tim Wright]

In <6806 at spdcc.SPDCC.COM> rbraun at spdcc.COM (Rich Braun) writes:

>This is a related question, regarding cpio under SCO and AIX:

>	How do I read tapes across two machines with byte-swapped
>	architectures?

>If I create a tape (or disk archive) with cpio under SCO, and another
>under AIX, then swap the two tapes, neither machine can read the other's
>format.  If I "od" the tape dump, I see that the header bytes seem to
>be swapped for each 16-bit short word.

Try
$ dd if=your_tape_dev bs=20b conv=swab | cpio ...

That will swap alternate bytes. I agree that the -c option ought to work.
I'm fairly sure I've transferred between a SUN 3 and Sys V/386 (different
byte order), so is cpio under AIX broken ?
Does AIX use the extended cpio headers (a la SVR4), if so you would need
to add '-H odc' to force it to write compatible headers.

Tim
--
Tim Wright, Dell Computer Corp., Bracknell    |  Domain: tim at dell.co.uk
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