I have an rpm and I want to treat it like a tarball. I want to extract the contents into a directory so I can inspect the contents. I am familiar with the querying commands
$ mkdir packagecontents; cd packagecontents $ rpm2cpio ../foo.rpm | cpio -idmv $ find .
For Reference: the cpio arguments are
-i = extract -d = make directories -m = preserve modification time -v = verbose
I found the answer over here: lontar's answer