On Jun 26, 2006, at 1:06 PM, Ben Collver wrote:
>> "man pax" has a discussion about this.
>
> The file name in question is less than 100 characters.  Where does the
> man page discuss pax inheriting a 100-character path limit for the  
> cpio
> format?

"man pax" says this:

            tar      The old BSD tar format as found in 4.3BSD.  The  
default
                     blocksize for this format is 10240 bytes.   
Pathnames
                     stored by this format must be 100 characters or  
less in
                     length.  Only regular files, hard links, soft  
links, and
                     directories will be archived (other file system  
types are
                     not supported).  For backwards compatibility  
with even
                     older tar formats, a -o option can be used when  
writing an
                     archive to omit the storage of directories.   
This option
                     takes the form:
                           -o write_opt=nodir

...and "man cpio" says this:

        cpio supports the following archive formats:  binary,  old   
ASCII,  new
        ASCII, crc, HPUX binary, HPUX old ASCII, old tar, and POSIX.1  
tar.  The
        binary format is obsolete because  it  encodes  information   
about  the
        files in a way that is not portable between different machine  
architec-
        tures.  The old ASCII format  is  portable  between   
different  machine
        architectures,  but  should  not be used on file systems with  
more than
        65536 i-nodes.  The new ASCII  format  is  portable  between   
different
        machine  architectures  and can be used on any size file  
system, but is
        not supported by all versions of cpio; currently, it is only   
supported
        by GNU and Unix System V R4.  The crc format is like the new  
ASCII for-
        mat, but also contains a checksum for each file which  cpio   
calculates
        when  creating  an archive and verifies when the file is  
extracted from
        the archive.  The HPUX formats  are  provided  for   
compatibility  with
        HPUX's cpio which stores device files differently.

        The  tar format is provided for compatibility with the tar  
program.  It
        can not be used to archive files with names longer than 100  
characters,
        and  can  not be used to archive "special" (block or  
character devices)
        files.  The POSIX.1 tar format can not be used to  archive   
files  with
        names  longer  than 255 characters (less unless they have a  
"/" in just
        the right place).

-- 
-Chuck