Tech

How to Extract an RPM Without Installing

To extract or “unbuild” and RPM so you can see its files you have to use two programs.  The first is rpm2cpio, the second is cpio.

rpm2cpio: Extract cpio archive from RPM Package Manager (RPM) package.

cpio – allows a user to copy file to and from an archive.

[code lang=”bash” title=”Do this as root”]linux:/tmp/rpmsource# rpm2cpio <>.src.rpm | cpio -idmv [/code]

Explanation: rpm2cpio takes the rpm and runs the extraction that is then piped through cpio to extract the files to a local directory.   FLAGS: -i extract, -d make directories where needed, -m preserve modification time, -v verbose mode will list the names of the files as they are extracted.

I’m not sure if this will work for non-src rpms.

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