How to extract RPM or DEB packages

From ::

http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/01/28/how-to-extract-rpm-or-deb-packages/

RPM and DEB packages are both containers for other files. An RPM is some sort ofcpio archive. On the other hand, a DEB file is a pure ar archive. So, it should be possible to unpack their contents using standard archiving tools, regardless of your distribution’s package format. Under normal conditions, you should use your distribution’s standard package manager, rpm ordpkg and their frontends, to manage those files. But, if you need to be more generic, here is how to do it.

RPM

For RPMs you need two command line utilities,rpm2cpio and cpio. Extracting the contents of the RPM package is aone step process:

rpm2cpio mypackage.rpm | cpio -vid

If you just need to list the contents of the package without extracting them, use the following:

rpm2cpio mypackage.rpm | cpio -vt

The -v option is used in order to get verbose output to the stdout. If you don’t need it, you can safely omit this switch. For more information about thecpio options, please refer to the cpio(1) manual page.

DEB

DEB files are ar archives, which contain three files:

• debian-binary
• control.tar.gz
• data.tar.gz

As you might have already guessed, the needed archived files exist indata.tar.gz. It is also obvious that unpacking this file is a two-step process.

First, extract the aforementioned three files from the DEB file (ar archive):

ar vx mypackage.deb

Then extract the contents ofdata.tar.gz using tar:

tar -xzvf data.tar.gz

Or, if you just need to get alisting of the files:

tar -tzvf data.tar.gz

Again the -v option in bothar and tar is used in order to get verbose output. It is safe not to use it. For more information, read the man pages:tar(1) and ar(1).

If anyone knows aone step process to extract the contents of the data.tar.gz, I’d be very interested in it!

Update

As Jon suggested in the comment area, the contents of data.tar.gz can be extracted from the DEB package in a one step process as shown below:

ar p mypackage.deb data.tar.gz | tar zx

That will do it.