This article is from a FAQ concerning SCO operating systems. While some of the information may be applicable to any OS, or any Unix or Linux OS, it may be specific to SCO Xenix, Open Desktop or Openserver.

There is lots of Linux, Mac OS X and general Unix info elsewhere on this site: Search this site is the best way to find anything.

Unix, Xenix and ODT General FAQ

How do I get a file off my distribution diskettes?

The simplest way is to use custom to reinstall that file. If you can't do this for some reason, try the following. Note that with the extensive use of symlinks in OSR5, this method may not be very easy to use on OSR5 because you may not know the actual file you want (which is the file within the SSO tree, not the file in the usual place you're accustomed to finding it).

This is obviously dated: no floppy installations exist anymore- it's all CD (09/13/2000).

NOTE: This applies ONLY to diskette media. I don't have tape or CD to play with here so I can't be sure on those. Please feel free to send deltas for these media.

First, find out which diskette it's on. Use your favourite search tool to look through /etc/perms/* for the file you want. The last field in each line of this file is the diskette label (e.g. N1, X2).

Find that diskette. Look on the label to see if it's a mountable filesystem (N1 is; N2 is on some distributions but not on others). If it's a filesystem, mount it and just copy the file. If it's not, it's in tar format, with relative pathnames. If the file you want is, say, /bin/foo, you'd extract it with a command like tar xv2 ./bin/foo

Roberto Zini:

Again, not strictly related but worth knowing: today I wanted to run a WAV-to-MP3 converted (originally provided for OS5 platforms) under UnixWare7. The package was distributed in the usual VOL.000.000 format; since it actually is a cpio archive, I've extracted the binary by making use of the 'r' option of cpio. I skipped over some unwanted control files (the ones which make the custom database) until I reached what I wanted to extract; once there I typed a new filename and the binary got extracted with that given name.

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