Howto extract RPM's

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Howto extract RPM's
started by: newby

Posted by newby on July 26 2006,14:17

I'm needing to extract files from an RPM, just extract, not load them.

Does anyone know of a tool for doing this?

Posted by mikshaw on July 26 2006,14:31

rpm would normally have the ability to do this, but in DSL rpm is part of the Busybox toolkit and therefore limited in its functionality.

You will probably need to install the "real" rpm in order to extract.

One other thing you could do is boot a liveCD or a "dsl base norestore" frugal system, install the package, and then manually copy the installed file(s). They will be in /usr/bin, /usr/share/appname, and maybe a config file in /etc.

Posted by nickelplated on July 26 2006,15:13

You could copy rpm and it's linked binaries into a temp folder along with the rpm and then run
sudo chroot /home/dsl/temp /rpm -i /myrpmfile.rpm
all the stuff should be installed into this fake root directory following its normal install instructions.

Posted by u2musicmike on July 26 2006,18:29

There is more than one way to skin an rpm. I have used alien.dsl to convert rpm to tgz. You can view and extract tgz using the tar command or submenu in emelfm.

Posted by mikshaw on July 26 2006,22:05

nickelplated & u2musicmike:

Both ideas are things I'd never considered. Thanks for those tips.

Posted by humpty on July 26 2006,22:47

rpm2cpio foo.rpm | cpio -idmv

i really can't remember where I got this from but it works.

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on July 27 2006,04:35

I use p7zip for everything related to extraction, just a
7z x %file
works with many types.

Posted by sankarv on Aug. 02 2006,06:47

There are zip tools such as Zip genius available for windows. You can use it in DSL through Wine and you can extract RPMs.

Possibly there wont be any loss of data.
Hope it runs with wine.

Posted by mikshaw on Aug. 02 2006,12:26

Not to criticize too harshly, but that sounds kinda silly.
You'd be growing an orange from an apple branch grafted onto an orange tree.

...or something like that.... =o)

Posted by sankarv on Aug. 03 2006,04:05

It is just a method.

i meant that for use even without windows.
People having windows finds very easy to work with that and for performance it is very good.