How can I read a cpio archive with absolute pathnames?

[Stephen J. Friedl]

In article <4019 at cup.portal.com>, itkin at cup.portal.com writes:
> In article <407 at vsi.UUCP>, I lament:
> > Customers are always dumping cpio archives to floppy with
> >
> >	find / -print | cpio ...
> >
> >and it drives us crazy when we need to restore something and they
> >have used full pathnames. [...]
> 
> This is one of those rare uses for the CHROOT command.  The steps are:
> 
> 	chroot /sparedir cpio...

/etc/chroot is sadly not as simple as it looks: you have to create
a whole directory tree under /sparedir: it has to contain:

	/sparedir/bin/cpio
	/sparedir/dev/tty	if you run multiple volumes
	/sparedir/dev/rmt0	or whatever, if you run multiple volumes
	/sparedir/bin/mkdir
	/sparedir/shlib/libc_s	for SVR3

at least.  This is tedious and I really hate to bother setting it
up all the time.  Sigh, I wish cpio had an option...

     Steve

-- 
Steve Friedl      V-Systems, Inc.        *Hi Mom*
friedl at vsi.com   {uunet,attmail,ihnp4}!vsi!friedl