thank you very much for this hint, it was very helpful! a little addition to your meaning about the interoperatibily of the restore-mechanism: you wrote:Restore is performed with 'cat /cdrom/full.tar.bz2* | bunzip2 -c | tar xf -' , which is perfectly interoperable among all Unices including deficient Linuxit is not absolute interoperable, because IRIX (tested on v6.5) interchanges the sequence of the splits, so that it one have to take care about that!
Well, the suggested command relies on ability of your *shell* to sort the list of files. So it's eiher that your shell is uncapable of sorting (broken shell or broken locale?) or IRIX mangles Rock-ridge names in unsortable manner. In latter case you should consider splitting to files with simpler if any extension, e.g. '| split -b 2095104 - /some/place/fill.'. A.