loverso@sunybcs.UUCP (John Robert LoVerso) (02/10/85)
We run 4.2 on a few vaxes, and have recently gotten a distribution tape for SysV.2. Well, I can read the tape with dd and see file headers, but I cant extract the stuff with tar. The tape has a blocksize of 5120, but even so: dd -ibs </dev/rmt12 | tar tvf - doesnt work. It gives checksum mismatch. The whole point is that there are certain programs we'd like to use from sysV - but dont want to convert one of our machines to sysV to get them! Any help on doing this would be appreciated. Respond by mail; I'll post a summary. Thanks! -- John Robert LoVerso @ SUNY Buffalo Computer Science (716-636-3004) ARPA: LoVerso%Buffalo@CSNET-RELAY BITNET: CSDJLV@SUNYABVA.BITNET CSNET: LoVerso@Buffalo.CSNET UUCP: ..![bbncca,decvax,dual,rocksanne,watmath]!sunybcs!loverso
gwyn@brl-tgr.ARPA (Doug Gwyn <gwyn>) (02/11/85)
Since this question keeps coming up, I will respond to the net. AT&T UNIX System V distributions are a combination of binary images and CPIO archives, several files per magtape. The CPIO archives recently have been "portable ASCII header" format, so one uses "cpio -idcB </dev/rmt12" or similar to roll them onto a filesystem. By the way, this is explained in the accompanying documentation.
lrr@siemens.UUCP (02/14/85)
The System V release 2 programs are distributed in cpio format, which makes tar somewhat useless. If you con't have a cpio hanging around, you may have to bring up system V read in the source, and then bring up 4.2 again. Once you've done that, and recompiled cpio under 4.2, it does work as expected. Larry Rogers Siemens Research and Technology Laboratories Princeton, NJ 08540
wombat@ccvaxa.UUCP (02/21/85)
The only catch is that cpio isn't distributed in 4.2BSD.