GNU cpio copies files into or out of a cpio or tar archive. Archives are files which contain a collection of other files plus information about them, such as their file name, owner, timestamps, and access permissions. The archive can be another file on the disk, a magnetic tape, or a pipe. GNU cpio supports the following archive formats: binary, old ASCII, new ASCII, crc, HPUX binary, HPUX old ASCII, old tar and POSIX.1 tar. By default, cpio creates binary format archives, so that they are compatible with older cpio programs. When it is extracting files from archives, cpio automatically recognizes which kind of archive it is reading and can read archives created on machines with a different byte-order. Install cpio if you need a program to manage file archives.