pax.1 (2011 09)

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pax(1) pax(1)

RETURN VALUE

The pax command returns a value of 0 (zero) if all ﬁles were successfully processed; otherwise,

pax

returns a value greater than 0 (zero).

EXAMPLES

To copy the contents of the current directory to the tape drive, enter:

pax -w -f /dev/rtape/tape4QIC150 .

To copy the olddir directory hierarchy to

newdir enter:

mkdir newdir

pax -rw olddir newdir

To read the archive a.pax, with all ﬁles rooted in the directory

/usr in the archive extracted relative to

the current directory, enter:

pax -r -s ’,//*usr//*,,’ -f a.pax

All of the preceding examples create archives in

tar format.

The following pairs of commands demonstrate conversions from

cpio and tar to pax. In all cases, the

examples show comparable command-line usage rather than identical output formats. The

-x ﬂag can

be speciﬁed to the

pax commands shown here, producing archives to select speciﬁc output formats:

ls * | cpio -ocv

pax -wdv *

find /mydir -type f -print | cpio -oc

find /mydir -type f -print | pax -w

cpio -icdum < archive

pax -r < archive

(cd /fromdir;find . -print) | cpio -pdlum /todir

pax -rwl /fromdir /todir

tar cf archive *

pax -w -f archive *

tar xfv - < archive

pax -rv < archive

(cd /fromdir; tar cf-.)|(cd/todir; tar xf -)

pax -rw /fromdir /todir

Note: When you use the -i ﬂag (interactively renames ﬁles) on ﬁles to which there are hard links,

pax

does not create hard links to the renamed ﬁles.

WARNINGS

Because of industry standards and interoperability goals,

pax does not support the archival of ﬁles of size

8GB or larger for both ustar and cpio formats. Also, pax does not support user and group IDs

greater than or equal to 2048K for ustar format. pax does not support and user and group IDs greater

than or equal to 256K for cpio format. With ustar format, ﬁles with user IDs greater than or equal to

2048K are restored under the user ID of the current process, unless the user name exists. The same

applies for group IDs. In cpio format, ﬁles with user or group IDs greater than or equal to 256K will not

be recovered with the original user or group IDs respectively.

For backward compatibility with previous releases of the command,

pax will automatically determine a

block size up to 32,768 on input.

AUTHOR

pax was developed by Mark H. Colburn, OSF, and HP.