Tar vs. cpio

Tar vs. cpio

Actually, the cpio command-line interface appears cleaner to me than tar's. But that's not enough reason to use cpio.

Both tar and cpio provide similar capabilities and store similar information about the files they contain. However, tar is *far* more commonly used than cpio, which means that tar extraction programs are also far more available than cpio. Furthermore, in spite of the older variations on the tar format, there has for some years been a standard for it.

I'm not convinced that cpio is really "saner" than the standard tar format, but even if that's true, we have known-good code for dealing with tar archives (GNU tar, and probably half a dozen independent implementations).

Tar is the de facto standard, and "standard is better than better".