Tim Kientzle of FreeBSD (author of libarchive, attempting to CC here) describes the cpio format here:
http://people.freebsd.org/~kientzle/libarchive/man/cpio.5.txt This document states about the SRV4 (newc) format (magic 070701, which is what we're dealing with): In this format, hardlinked files are handled by setting the filesize to zero for each entry except the last one that appears in the archive. So this is interpretation is shared by at least GNU and FreeBSD, afaict. pax appears to be in disagreement with these systems as far as its creation of SRV4/newc archives goes, since it stores a non-zero filesize for each entry of a hardlinked file. It's in dangerous disagreement with GNU and FreeBSD during the unpacking stage, because it re-creates hardlinked files as 0 bytes in length if it encounters archives created by the other utilities. Hope this is a useful reference, --dkg For Tim's reference: we're discussing pax here: http://bugs.debian.org/42158
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