Helpful Safety Tip

If you're on a Linux/UNIX system, and you want to extract a CPIO archive, don't do the following as root:

cpio -idv < archive.cpio


Because if the CPIO archive happens to have absolute pathnames and contains files like /lib/libc.so.0, you will render your computer inoperable.

Here ends another lesson in the category I call, "Duh, I already knew that but managed to do it anyway".