macOS: bsdcpio vs GNU cpio
6th October 2020
MacOS ships with cpio out of the box, however it’s worth noting it’s bsdcpio, not the GNU cpio.
While most of the functionality is identical, the set of available flags is inconsistent between the two.
If you need GNU cpio on macOS, you can install it via Homebrew:
$ brew install cpio
You’ll need to add it to your $PATH in .bashrc or similar to use it:
export PATH="/usr/local/opt/cpio/bin:$PATH"
Since this shadows a system binary, Homebrew won’t let you simply brew link it.