CPIO to TAR.LZMA (TLZMA) Converter
Convert your cpio files to tar.lzma online & free
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How to convert CPIO to TAR.LZMA
Select files from Computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, URL or by dragging it on the page.
Choose tar.lzma or any other format you need as a result (more than 200 formats supported)
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About formats
CPIO (Copy In, Copy Out) is a Unix archive format dating to the PWB/UNIX system at AT&T Bell Labs in 1977, predating even the tar format. The name describes the tool's original operation: copying files in to an archive and out from an archive. CPIO stores files sequentially with per-file headers containing the filename, inode information, permissions, ownership, timestamps, and file size, followed by the file data itself. The format exists in several variants: the original binary format, the POSIX.1-defined octet-oriented (ODC) format, the SVR4 newc format with expanded device and inode fields, and the CRC variant that adds checksum verification. Unlike tar, CPIO reads the list of files to archive from standard input, making it naturally composable with find and other Unix utilities through pipes. One advantage is faithful Unix metadata preservation — CPIO records device numbers, inode information, and hard link relationships with higher fidelity than early tar implementations, making it suitable for system-level backups and device file archiving. The format's central role in Linux package management is another practical significance: the RPM package format uses CPIO as its internal payload container, meaning every RPM-based Linux installation relies on CPIO extraction. While tar has become more common for general archiving, CPIO persists in system administration, initramfs images, and package management infrastructure.
TAR.LZMA is a compound archive format combining TAR archiving with the LZMA (Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain Algorithm) compression method developed by Igor Pavlov for the 7-Zip project around 1998. The TAR layer concatenates files with Unix metadata into a single stream, and the LZMA algorithm compresses it using a sophisticated combination of LZ77 dictionary matching with large dictionaries (up to 4 GB), Markov chain-based probability modeling, and range coding. LZMA was the predecessor to the LZMA2 algorithm used in XZ and 7Z formats. Compression ratios significantly exceed gzip and are comparable to bzip2 while offering substantially faster decompression. One advantage is the high compression ratio with fast extraction — LZMA decompresses at speeds close to gzip while achieving compression densities near bzip2 or better, making it efficient for distribution archives that are compressed once and extracted many times. The format is supported by tar's --lzma flag and by 7-Zip across all platforms. While TAR.LZMA has been largely succeeded by TAR.XZ (which uses LZMA2 in a more robust container with integrity checks), existing TAR.LZMA archives remain encountered in software distributions and backup systems that adopted the format before XZ became widely available.