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

Copy the .rpm file in a separate folder then run the following command $ yourfile.rpm | cpio -idmv

Answer 2

You can simply do tar -xvf <rpm file> as well!

Answer 3

Most distributions have installed the GUI app file-roller which unpacks tar, zip, rpm and many more.

file-roller --extract-here package.rpm

This will extract the contents in the current directory.

Answer 4

The powerful text-based file manager mc (Midnight Commander, vaguely reminding the Norton Commander of old DOS times) has the built-in capability of inspecting and unpacking .rpm and .rpms files, just "open" the .rpm(s) file within mc and select CONTENTS.cpio: for an rpm you get access to the install tree, for an rpms you get access to the .spec file and all the source packages.

Answer 5

The "DECOMPRESSION" test fails on CygWin, one of the most potentiaally useful platforms for it, due to the "grep" check for "xz" being case sensitive. The result of the "COMPRESSION:" check is:

COMPRESSION='/dev/stdin: XZ compressed data'

Simply replacing 'grep -q' with 'grep -q -i' everywhere seems to resolve the issue well.

I've done a few updates, particularly adding some comments and using "case" instead of stacked "if" statements, and included that fix below

#!/bin/sh
#
# rpm2cpio.sh - extract 'cpio' contents of RPM
#
# Typical usage: rpm2cpio.sh rpmname | cpio -idmv
#

if [ "$# -ne 1" ]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 file.rpm" 1>&2
    exit 1
fi

rpm="$1"
if [ -e "$rpm" ]; then
    echo "Error: missing $rpm"
fi


leadsize=96
o=`expr $leadsize + 8`
set `od -j $o -N 8 -t u1 $rpm`
il=`expr 256 \* \( 256 \* \( 256 \* $2 + $3 \) + $4 \) + $5`
dl=`expr 256 \* \( 256 \* \( 256 \* $6 + $7 \) + $8 \) + $9`
# echo "sig il: $il dl: $dl"

sigsize=`expr 8 + 16 \* $il + $dl`
o=`expr $o + $sigsize + \( 8 - \( $sigsize \% 8 \) \) \% 8 + 8`
set `od -j $o -N 8 -t u1 $rpm`
il=`expr 256 \* \( 256 \* \( 256 \* $2 + $3 \) + $4 \) + $5`
dl=`expr 256 \* \( 256 \* \( 256 \* $6 + $7 \) + $8 \) + $9`
# echo "hdr il: $il dl: $dl"

hdrsize=`expr 8 + 16 \* $il + $dl`
o=`expr $o + $hdrsize`
EXTRACTOR="dd if=$rpm ibs=$o skip=1"

COMPRESSION=`($EXTRACTOR |file -) 2>/dev/null`
DECOMPRESSOR="cat"

case $COMPRESSION in
    *gzip*|*GZIP*)
        DECOMPRESSOR=gunzip
        ;;
    *bzip2*|*BZIP2*)
        DECOMPRESSOR=bunzip2
        ;;
    *xz*|*XZ*)
        DECOMPRESSOR=unxz
        ;;
    *cpio*|*cpio*)
        ;;
    *)
        # Most versions of file don't support LZMA, therefore we assume
        # anything not detected is LZMA
        DECOMPRESSOR="`which unlzma 2>/dev/null`"
        case "$DECOMPRESSOR" in
            /*)
                DECOMPRESSOR="$DECOMPRESSOR"
                ;;
            *)
                DECOMPRESSOR=`which lzmash 2>/dev/null`
                case "$DECOMPRESSOR" in
                    /* )
                        DECOMPRESSOR="lzmash -d -c"
                        ;;
                    *  )
                        echo "Warning: DECOMPRESSOR not found, assuming 'cat'" 1>&2
                        ;;
                esac
                ;;
        esac
esac

$EXTRACTOR 2>/dev/null | $DECOMPRESSOR

Answer 6

Did you try the rpm2cpio commmand? See the example below:

$ rpm2cpio php-5.1.4-1.esp1.x86_64.rpm | cpio -idmv

/etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf  
./etc/php.d  
./etc/php.ini  
./usr/bin/php  
./usr/bin/php-cgi  
etc