[CALUG] FC5 Help

[Dave Dodge]

On Thu, Jul 06, 2006 at 09:50:51AM -0400, Jason C. Miller wrote:
> On Thu, 6 Jul 2006, Hugh Brown wrote:
> > rpm2cpio <neededrpm>.rpm | cpio -idv
>
> Yeah...rpm2cpio requires those libraries.  :)

BTW an rpm file can be converted to a cpio file with pretty much
anything that can edit binary data.  An RPM file contains a header
followed by a gzipped cpio file.  The start of the gzip data can be
found by looking for its magic number.  So you just cut everything
before the gzip data, then gunzip the rest to produce the cpio file.

For example in emacs you can skim through the file until it switches
from rough plaintext to scrambled garbage, and around there somewhere
should be the "^_\213" that indicates the start of gzipped data.

There's at least one perl script that does the job automatically:

  http://linuxmafia.com/pub/linux/utilities-general/rpm2cpio

Of course you still need to be able to run gzip and cpio or you're
just as stuck.

                                                  -Dave Dodge