For some unknown reason, Oracle considers it necessary to distribute their UNIX software in .cpio files. Since this is the only time I ever use cpio, I can never remember the command and I always end up looking it up.

Well, for future reference, here is how you extract a .cpio file to the current directory on most platforms:

cpio -idmv < filename_to_extract.cpio

Some platforms, like AIX, may give errors like this with these options:

cpio: 0511-903 Out of phase!
cpio attempting to continue…

cpio: 0511-904 skipping 732944 bytes to get back in phase!
One or more files lost and the previous file is possibly corrupt!

cpio: 0511-027 The file name length does not match the expected value.

If you run into these you need to add the c option as the headers are stored in ASCII. The command should now look like this:

cpio -idcmv < filename_to_extract.cpio

For more information refer to the man page for cpio, but this is all I ever do with cpio. For a better UNIX archiving utility, consider tar.