🚀 go-pugleaf

Vernon Schryver <vjs@calcite.rhyolite.com> wrote:
>Contemplate the byte-order dependencies in the tar.  There are programs
>that can read and write all of the common cpio and tar formats, and
>these programs can be compiled to run on either big or little endian
>machines.  Nevertheless, neither tar nor cpio use XDR or ANS.1.

Correct.

"tar" uses ASCII.

"cpio -c" uses ASCII.

"cpio" without "-c" uses binary, but, fortunately, there's a
more-than-one-byte magic number at the front of a "cpio" archive, so a
clueful "cpio" archive reader can look at the magic number and figure
out whether the archive was written on a big-endian or little-endian
machine.

>Yes, you often use ASCII, but only for trivial amounts of data

Such as "tar" and "cpio" control information?  Neither "tar" nor "cpio"
use any machine-independent representation for file data, but I'm not
sure it would be possible to *make* it do so, without having an
"object-oriented file system" in which each file has a serialize method
associated with it (i.e., "tar" or "cpio" in most OSes has no idea what
format the file it's writing is in).