How do I extract the contents of an rpm?

Question

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

Answer 1

Sometimes you can encounter an issue with intermediate RPM archive:

cpio: Malformed number
cpio: Malformed number
cpio: Malformed number
. . .
cpio: premature end of archive

That means it could be packed, these days it is LZMA2 compression as usual, by xz:

rpm2cpio .rpm | xz -d | cpio -idmv

otherwise you could try:

rpm2cpio .rpm | lzma -d | cpio -idmv