Comments on: How To Extract an RPM Package Without Installing It (rpm extract command)

By: Pete Wilson

Pete Wilson — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 07:34:23 +0000

Fantastic! The command line as you gave it worked perfectly: 100% correct, unlike the usual almost-correct posting that I have to debug. You saved me hours of work. Thank you!

By: Zoid

Zoid — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 10:50:18 +0000

Hey, this worked great. I kept getting segmentation fault with plain old rpm and all I really needed from the rpm was some source files in a direction. :-)

By: chetan

chetan — Sat, 16 May 2009 16:21:32 +0000

cool nice post

By: amit

amit — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 05:36:20 +0000

Thanks,
its very helpful :)

By: Balakumar

Balakumar — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 06:23:18 +0000

Thanks Vivek,
It is very Useful

By: Marcio Carneiro

Marcio Carneiro — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 22:33:58 +0000

So, now I have the rpm opened and with all dirs.
Can I just mv to / and have program installed and running?
Yes, I know, if this works the rpm database is not updated.
But this works?

By: Sanjay

Sanjay — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 01:42:09 +0000

Its really very fantastic search i ever made.

By: Ritobroto Ram

Ritobroto Ram — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 04:32:15 +0000

Just what I needed in the nick of time…

Thank You!!!

By: Martijn

Martijn — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 10:04:21 +0000

Thanks, just what I needed.

By: Samuel Benjamin

Samuel Benjamin — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 12:29:58 +0000

Excellent article that helped us save a lot of time from having to actually install a 64 bit linux system just to be able to retrieve the rpms for that platform.

I would suggest that the author remove the first two lines of the incomplete example which throws the user off until they realize that the cpio part has to be run together for actually extract the files.

No need to display :
rpm2cpio myrpmfile.rpm
rpm2cpio – < myrpmfile.rpm

(the above command dumps a continuous stream of unreadable characters to the screen)

Just need to know :
rpm2cpio myrpmfile.rpm | cpio -idmv

Thanks for sharing this with the linux community.

- Samuel Benjamin, NC.

By: vivek

vivek — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:03:44 +0000

@Matthew, To display scripts you need to use rpm command as follows, this faq is about extracting file from rpm. In short type:

rpm -pq --scripts file.rpm
rpm -pq --scripts rsnapshot-1.3.0-1.noarch.rpm

Here is sample output from my rpm:

postinstall scriptlet (using /bin/sh):
#
# upgrade rsnapshot config file
#
RSNAPSHOT_CONFIG_VERSION=`/usr/bin/rsnapshot check-config-version`
if test $? != 0; then
        echo "Error upgrading /etc/rsnapshot.conf"
fi

if test "$RSNAPSHOT_CONFIG_VERSION" = "1.2"; then
        # already latest version
        exit 0
fi

if test "$RSNAPSHOT_CONFIG_VERSION" = "unknown"; then
        /usr/bin/rsnapshot upgrade-config-file
        RETVAL=$?
        exit $RETVAL
fi

HTH

By: Matthew

Matthew — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 02:30:16 +0000

This is very good, however, I don’t think I see the installation script from inside the RPM. how do I get that? If I’m missing something, please let me know. Thank you!

By: langda

langda — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 09:02:26 +0000

thanks a lot..

By: ram

ram — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:12:44 +0000

Saved me a hole lot of time.

Thank you.

By: Robert

Robert — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 03:07:46 +0000

I just found this page and it is great. One thing to note is that opensuse compresses the cpio part with lzma to decrease size so you have to do something like the following instead.

rpm2cpio file.rpm | lzma -d | cpio -idmv

This will extract the files for you.

By: Kulbir Saini

Kulbir Saini — Sun, 25 May 2008 15:06:04 +0000

thanks a lot :)

By: Jared

Jared — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 17:12:13 +0000

I love it when I search Google and find a good answer right away.

Thank you so much.

By: Jared

Jared — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 17:11:46 +0000

thanks…worked first time

By: nixcraft

nixcraft — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 14:40:16 +0000

Thanks for pointing out alien package to convert rpm to tgz.

By: Ivan

Ivan — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 10:19:17 +0000

You can also use alien package to convert rpm to tgz…