Re: old (1990) cpio archive reporting the error: unknown file type

[Tim Kientzle]

This appears to be a CPIO archive stored in the original cpio format introduced as part of Programmer’s Work Bench (PWB), a variant of 6th Edition UNIX.

The PWB format differed from that used in 7th Edition Unix in how it represented file types.

The first file in this archive, for example, is stored with a file type of octal 110644.  In the PWB format, this indicated a regular file with IALLOC and ILARG flags set (neither of which is relevant for cpio purposes).  In later 7th Edition, this is nonsense (a “regular file” that is also a “named pipe”), which explains the errors you are seeing.

In short, you’ll need to find or write a program that can extract the PWB format.  I’m not sure if GNU cpio can do this — it probably assumes “bin” format is the 7th Edition Format.  I don’t recall if bsdcpio can extract this or not — I’d have to check the sources.

Fortunately, cpio format is very easy to read.  It has a fixed-layout header for each entry, followed by the filename and file contents.  So if you know how to read binary data from one file and write it to another, you can probably cobble up something workable in an afternoon.  The header details can be found online: https://man.archlinux.org/man/cpio.5.en

Tim

On Dec 15, 2022, at 10:16 AM, Alice Lecinski <alice@ucar.edu> wrote:

Thank you so very much for your response.

Please find attached the results of:

od -xv --address-radix=d FILE_001 > V00063_hexdump.txt

Thank you,

Alice

On Wed, Dec 14, 2022 at 7:10 PM Tim Kientzle <tim@kientzle.com> wrote:

Can you  provide a hex dump of the first 128 or so bytes of the archive?

Tim

On Dec 14, 2022, at 12:40 PM, Alice Lecinski <alice@ucar.edu> wrote:

I have a very old cpio archive written in approximately 1990.

It was most likely written on a VAX VMS (~linux) system.

This is historical data and fairly important...

When I attempt to get the files using:

cpio -iv --no-absolute-filenames --force-local --format='bin' < FILE_001 

I get the following output:

cpio: ecl9w2: unknown file type

ecl9w2

cpio: g: unknown file type

g

cpio: ssss: unknown file type

ssss

cpio: t: unknown file type

t

wwww

5480 blocks

When I then do an 'ls', the 'wwww' file has been created.   But none of the other files:

'ecl9w2', 'g', 't'

exist.   

The 'wwww' file is ascii and readable.   I know the 'ecl9w2' file is binary.

Any suggestions?

Thank you,

Alice

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>
Alice Lecinski                                
Associate Scientist IV                    
High Altitude Observatory            www2.hao.ucar.edu

HAO is a division of the National Center for Atmospheric Research,
which is operated by the University Corporation for Atmospheric
Research under sponsorship of the National Science Foundation.
<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

<V00063_hexdump.txt>