On Mon, Jun 26, 2006 at 11:59:36AM -0700, Ben Collver wrote:
> I don't need to stick with the cpio format.  I'd like to understand what
> is going wrong.  If a field is busting an 18bit limit, I wonder which
> one?  Of the archiver programs and formats in the NetBSD base system,
> which would you recommend?

Looks like pax has special handling for device and inode numbers that
don't fit in the header, which is why a large inode number worked. What
about uid, gid, and link count (ls -ln filename)?

As for a recommendation, I'm not sure I really have one--I've used either
tar or pax with the default settings (ustar), not because of any specific
benefit of the format, but because they're the defaults. In any case,
I don't recall running into any problems with them.