Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

The shell remains one of the most powerful tools on a computer system — yet a large number of users are unaware of how much one can accomplish with it. Using a combination of simple commands, we will see how to solve complex problems in day to day computer usage.Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition will take you through useful real-world recipes designed to make your daily life easy when working with the shell. The book shows the reader how to effectively use the shell to accomplish complex tasks with ease.The book discusses basics of using the shell, general commands and proceeds to show the reader how to use them to perform complex tasks with ease.Starting with the basics of the shell, we will learn simple commands with their usages allowing us to perform operations on files of different kind. The book then proceeds to explain text processing, web interaction and concludes with backups, monitoring and other sysadmin tasks.Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition serves as an excellent guide to solving day to day problems using the shell and few powerful commands together to create solutions.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Archiving with cpio


cpio is another archiving format similar to tar. It is used to store files and directories in a file with attributes such as permissions, ownership, and so on. But, it is not commonly used as much as tar. However, cpio is used in RPM package archives (which are used in distros such as Fedora), initramfs files for the Linux kernel which contain the kernel image, and so on. This recipe will give minimal usage examples of cpio.

How to do it...

cpio takes input filenames through stdin and it writes the archive into stdout. We have to redirect stdout to a file to receive the output cpio file as follows:

  1. Create test files:

    $ touch file1 file2 file3
    
  2. We can archive the test files as follows:

    $ echo file1 file2 file3 | cpio -ov > archive.cpio
    
  3. In order to list files in a cpio archive use the following command:

    $ cpio -it < archive.cpio
    
  4. In order to extract files from the cpio archive use:

    $ cpio -id < archive.cpio
    

How it works...

For the archiving command:

  • -o specifies the output...