Hi.

I am wondering if there's a way to "dissemble" RPM package files. For instance, if the file called "daihard-1.0.i386.rpm" contains several shared object files (*.so), I'd like to extract them from the package file. I may know the exact names of the files, or I may only know the file extension. Is this possible at all?

Thanks!
Dai

When you get a new package, you may want to examine it to see what it offers. Using query mode, you can peek inside. To simply query a package and get some generic information about it, just simply:

rpm -qp (package)

This should bring just the name of the package. A much more useful method is to get the package information from the package itself:

rpm -qip (package)

This will bring up the author, build host and date, whether it's installed yet, etc, about a package. Also included is a summary about the package's functionality and features.

If you want to see what is really inside the package, what files are inside of it? Well, you can list the contents of a package, much like you would get the table of contents of a tar archive (using tar -tvf):

rpm -qlp (package)

This will list all of the files within the archive, using their full pathnames. I use this often to see what will be installed with a package, but most importantly where. I like to stick to conventions about putting stuff in their expected places, but some packagers do not.

If you only want to extract a particular file from a package, such as a needed version of a library, but you don't want to install the package, you can use the Midnight Commander (mc). It will give you a directory like listing of the rpm contents, much like arc allows you to see the contents of a compressed tar or zip file.

Of course if you wish to use a library file, you will need to run ldconfig yourself.
And it may have a dependency that the RPM would normally provide.

And doing it from the command line:

rpm2cpio /path/to/rpm | cpio -ivd path/to/file

where "path/to/file" means the path to the file inside the rpm, and the command will create ./path/to/file in the current directory (so, do NOT issue the above command when you are in the root directory, or you risk accidentally overwriting the installed files).

Nice to know this is possible.. Cheers J_Szucs !!

Thanks all for your help! It's very nice to know there are different ways to approach this issue. My particular goal was to take this font RPM which contains a few nice-looking fonts and extract the actual font files to install on my Linux box. (I tried installing the package itself but it failed with some dependancy issues.)

I've been able to extract the necessary font files from the package following your advice. Thanks again!!!