pax, which means peace in Latin, combines the best of both cpio and tar, which are found in nearly all modern GNU/Linux distributions. However, it appears as though it hasn’t been updated in several years!
Benefits include:
- can use ‘find’ to get list of files, which is then piped through to pax (cpio style)
- can read and write many archive formats, including ustar (default), cpio, and many others
- can do copy-pass mode (copy entire directory tree to another location)
- can do gzip compression on the fly (tar style)
man pax will show you more example