[NTLUG:Discuss] Relocating rpm's

[Jeff Rush]

On Sun, 26 Sep 1999 18:48:06 -0500, Brian wrote:

>Is there any way to get around this?  I usually stay away from rpm's for
>this very reason, having found them to be very inflexible.  Is there any
>way to strip away the rpm wrapper so I can simply get at the files?

Odd, RPMs are -the- reason I'm into Linux.  Before them, I found the
scattered file structure of Unix too hard to ride herd on and I had to
be an expert on too many obscure tools to rebuild from tarballs.
Now I also create RPMs for many of the things I come across.

You can convert an RPM into a cpio archive, using rpm2cpio.

To list the files in a package:
    rpm2cpio blah-1.0-1.i386.rpm | cpio -t

To extract one or more files:
    rpm2cpio blah-1.0-1.i386.rpm | cpio -ivd usr/man/man8/file-you-want

Or to get them all:
    rpm2cpio blah-1.0-1.i386.rpm | cpio -ivd

-Jeff Rush