[rescue] converting an backup from tar to cpio

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

Hi, This is more of a general syadmin question,  but it has
relevance to my ESIX recsue project, so I bring it up here.

I have an archive written by gnu tar as in:

	gnutar cvf - -C / (all the directories) | ssh gsm at xxx dd of=machine.tar

Now I want to read it on a system that only has SYSVR4 tar (which does not
like the files or support wildcards very well) and cpio. 
It's  a floppy based install system and does not have cc so I can;t
compile gnutar without a large install. 

What I would like to do is to convert the archive file to cpio and then I
can get it over to the machine and restore it. So far in 13 years of
doing UNIX system administration I have come up with:

Since it was backed up with gnutar the filenames have no leading slash,
so I can restore it to a temp area with tar --same-owner --same-permissions.
and then  back it up with CPIO.

It currently resides on a linux machine, so I have gnutar, gnu cpio, pax,
dd, etc on it.

Any ideas?

TIA,

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson gsm at mendelson.com 972-54-608-069
Do sysadmins count networked sheep?