From RootdevWiki
This is a truly dreadful command and I'm not surprised nobody uses it any more.
If you want a fright, just type cpio --help and look at the options.
Or type man cpio and see if you can make sense of this:
In copy-out mode, cpio copies files into an archive. In copy-in mode, cpio copies files out of an archive
What is this, the Hokey-cokey?
Using CPIO
Number one tip here is probably: Don't.
If you're unfortunate enough to find yourself with a cpio archive, here's how you extract it:
cpio -id < archive.cpio
If you don't use the -d switch you will find yourself having to run the command multiple times to create each new directory level as you work your way down through the archive.
In conclusion
What's wrong with tar?
