reading sysV dist tape under 4.2

[Doug Gwyn <gwyn>]

Since this question keeps coming up, I will respond to the net.
AT&T UNIX System V distributions are a combination of binary images
and CPIO archives, several files per magtape.  The CPIO archives
recently have been "portable ASCII header" format, so one uses
"cpio -idcB </dev/rmt12" or similar to roll them onto a filesystem.
By the way, this is explained in the accompanying documentation.