or ask someone to extract or create a cpio archive without manpages *gg. heck, even with man i doubt much people still know how to use that. granted, tar is more accessible and has made cpio somewhat obsolete when it comes to archiving.

but i still use cpio when migrating data across mountpoints and i need the files to look exactly the same (user, timestamp, link aso):

find . |cpio -paumd $targetdir

so simple, so sexy ;)

well, at least on solaris systems this find command does not *work like a charm* when searching approx. more than 2000 files (or however many filenames fit on your shell stack). and it greps directories too, thus the correct and always *working like a charm* cmd to grep in several files is:

find . -type f |xargs grep keyword