[illumos-Developer] ejecting the archivers from illumos-gate

[Joerg Schilling]

Dennis Clarke <dclarke at blastwave.org> wrote:

>
> >> I think the miniroot build and runtime uses cpio.
> >> Don't have time to look right now.
> >
> > Many procedures in Solaris depend on cpio and unfortunately, they even
> > depend
> > on undocumented features from cpio. pkgadd(1) is such a candidate. Star
> > implements the needed features, so it is even possible to replace the Sun
> > programs by star. Note that the GNU variants of the utilities do not
> > implement
> > the needed features and thus cannot replace the sun programs.
> >
> > Jörg
>
> Just a question. When you say "undocumented" do you mean "not in the
> manpage" or "not described in the POSIX or SUSv3 specs at OpenGroup" or
> perhaps simply that the options being used are in the open source code and
> no where else?

In this special case, I have a specific behavior of the Sun (and SVR4????) cpio 
in mind.

Sun cpio is able to extract files on a live system without killing running 
applicaions and with being able to restore the original file in case the 
extract was not successful. Star (if not called as "cpio") needs the option 
"-install" to do the same, other implementations do not implement this feature 
at all.

Jörg

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