cpio: Introduction

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1 1 Introduction
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1 GNU cpio copies files into or out of a cpio or tar archive, The archive
1 can be another file on the disk, a magnetic tape, or a pipe.
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1    GNU cpio supports the following archive formats: binary, old ASCII,
1 new ASCII, crc, HPUX binary, HPUX old ASCII, old tar, and POSIX.1 tar.
1 The tar format is provided for compatibility with the 'tar' program.  By
1 default, cpio creates binary format archives, for compatibility with
1 older cpio programs.  When extracting from archives, cpio automatically
1 recognizes which kind of archive it is reading and can read archives
1 created on machines with a different byte-order.
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