Re: [Bug-cpio] CPIO Specification

[Tim Kientzle]

Christian Grobmeier wrote:
> I am highly interested in the internals of CPIO. Unfortnuatly i didn't
> find the specifications about the format of a CPIO archive, for
> example whats the "TRAILER!!!" and such.
>
> Can anybody help me out with the link or a hint where I can find the document?

There are many CPIO variants, most are undocumented.

POSIX standardized an "octet-oriented" format (today called
"odc") that is now documented as being one of the formats
supported by pax:

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/pax.html

In the process of working on libarchive, I scraped together
documentation for a number of cpio formats; you can see the result
at:

http://people.freebsd.org/~kientzle/libarchive/man/cpio.5.txt

or get the mdoc source file at

http://libarchive.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/libarchive/cpio.5

Cheers,

Tim