From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322) Description of problem: When cpio creates a tar file via -H ustar or -H tar, files with dates after January 10 2004 at 13:37:03 UTC are archived with an incorrect mtime of January 1970 (i.e. 34 yrs and 10 days earlier than the correct date), and will be restored with that incorrect mtime whether restored by cpio or tar. The special thing about that date and time is that in octal the mtime value is 7777777777. After that, an 11th octal digit is needed, but cpio is only storing the rightmost 10 octal digits in the tar file mtime field. The problem has also been found in earlier versions of Red Hat Linux (7.3, 6.1). Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): cpio-2.5-3 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.echo hello >/tmp/hello 2.touch -t 200401111200 /tmp/hello 3.echo /tmp/hello | cpio -oH ustar | cpio -itv Try the same thing with a touch -t 200401091200 or any other date before January 10 2004 at 13:37:04 UTC and it works. Actual Results: -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6 Jan 1 1970 /tmp/hello Expected Results: -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6 Jan 11 12:00 /tmp/hello Additional info:
See also suggested patch at: http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-cpio/2004-01/msg00007.html and next in thread: http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-cpio/2004-01/msg00008.html