cpio Out of phase -- get help

[Jack F. Vogel]

In article <1178 at msa3b.UUCP> kevin at msa3b.UUCP (Kevin P. Kleinfelter) writes:
>I have been shipping many cpio files from a SYSV system to my
>AIX PS/2 system.  For most of these files, cpio has worked quite nicely.
>On one, it aborts with:
>	Out of phase -- get help.
>What does this mean, and what can I do about it?

Kevin, cpio has fixed length records as headers for the elements of its
archive; without looking at the source, I believe the out of phase message
means it got an error in scanning the header records. Since I recently
fixed a problem with cpio that caused it to mangle headers when dealing
with special device files I know that this problem is in the 1.1 version.
(That may not be the cause of your error, however.) I would recommend anyone
running 1.1 not use cpio to backup your local filesystem, it will create
an archive without errors but will bomb trying to restore it.

Now, as for what you can do. One question is, do you get the out-of-phase
error immediately or only after reading some portion of the archive?? If
the former, I suggest you may have a bad archive and might well not be
able to recover. If the latter, I recommend you lay your hands on afio,
which can recover from errors in an archive and continue. As a matter of
fact, afio might even recover some portion of the archive in either case.
Also, are you using the B flag in your read command, if not you might
try and include it. You can obtain afio from any unix.sources archive,
and, yes, I have built it without too many problems under AIX/PS2.

Good luck!
Disclaimer: This is not an official posting, my opinions only.



-- 
Jack F. Vogel			jackv at seas.ucla.edu
AIX Technical Support	              - or -
Locus Computing Corp.		jackv at ifs.umich.edu