Listing the table of contents on a tape takes a long time because the cpio command must process the entire archive.
The following example shows how to list the files on the tape in drive 0.
$ cpio -civt < /dev/rmt/0 -rw-r--r-- 1 root other 0 Jul 28 14:59 2004, filea -rw-r--r-- 1 root other 0 Jul 28 14:59 2004, fileb -rw-r--r-- 1 root other 0 Jul 28 14:59 2004, filec drwxr-xr-x 2 root other 0 Jul 28 14:59 2004, letters drwxr-xr-x 2 root other 0 Jul 28 15:00 2004, reports 16 blocks $ |