1. GNU cpio -- a program to manage archives of files. GNU cpio is a tool for creating and extracting archives, or copying files from one place to another. It handles a number of cpio formats as well as reading and writing tar files. This package also includes rmt, the remote tape server, and GNU mt, a tape drive control program. The mt program is essential for magnetic tape drive users. Debian's version of GNU mt supports SCSI tape drives. From Debian 3.0r0 APT

2. 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.1tar. 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 readingand can read archives created on machines with a different byte-order. Install cpio if you need a program to manage file archives. From Mandrake 9.0 RPM

3. copy files to and from archives From whatis