guy@gorodish.Sun.COM (Guy Harris) (02/11/88)
> An even more correct thing to do is for cpio to always write archive headers > in a canonical format that is not dependent on the byte-ordering of the > hardware. E.g., all header data written least significant byte first. > > In other words, portability ought to be achieved by making the cpio *format* > portable, not just by compensating for nonportability in the format (in this > case, ambiguity in byte ordering). There is already such a "cpio" format. Presumably, it's not the default for reasons of backwards compatibility. The correct thing to do *WITH OLD "cpio" FORMAT FILES* is to attempt to figure out the byte order from the header and translate it; yes, there ARE old "cpio" format files out there, and yes, sometimes you have to read them on machines with a different byte order.