cpio and UNIX standards

[Dominick Samperi]

The man page on cpio format, cpio(4), is a little unclear. It states that
the size of a binary header is rounded to "word", and I assume this means
the natural word size for a particular machine, sizeof(int). But on several
machines that I checked (PC AT's, 3b2/400) it seems that the header size is
always rounded to be a multiple of 2, even when the word size is 4.
Furthermore, it seems that the size of the file data part is also rounded
to a multiple of 2, and this is not mentioned in the man page at all.
Complicating this even more is the fact that in AT&T's User Ref. Manual it
states that cpio assumes "a word size of 4 bytes."

I tried to find published standards for cpio and tar, but without success.
Can someone tell me where I can find information on such standards, POSIX
documents, etc.? Thanks.


-- 
Dominick Samperi, Manhattan College, NYC
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