HOWTO: Extracting RPM from command line

Izhar Firdaus Follow Support Jan 17, 2007 · 1 min read

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Sometimes, admins might want to extract some files from a RPM file for some purposes. If on a system with GUI, this can be easily done using file-roller or some other GUI based archive manager that supports RPM/CPIO archives. RPMs are basically modified CPIO archives, so we use rpm2cpio and cpio command to extract files from it in a CLI environment.

List out contained files

rpm2cpio <rpmpackage.rpm> |cpio -t

Extract all files

rpm2cpio <rpmpackage.rpm> |cpio -id

Extract specific file

rpm2cpio <rpmpackage.rpm> |cpio -id <file>

Note: extracting specific files requires you to put the full path of the file in the archive which you get from the cpio -t output.

You can read more about using cpio from the manpages and from this site

Written by Izhar Firdaus Follow Support

I'm a system architect, data engineer and developer advocate with passion in Free / Open Source software, entrepreneurship, community building, education and martial art. I take enjoyment in bridging and bringing together different FOSS technologies to help businesses and organizations utilize IT infrastructure to aid and optimize their business and organizational process.