R P M U N P A C K Today, many sources and binaries for the Linux community get distributed as files for the RedHat Package Manager, or RPM for short. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any freely available decoder source code for those packages, not to speak of a format description. Therefore I took a look at some RPM packages, compared them a little bit, and finally wrote this little program as a quick hack. It extracts the main archive from an RPM file, which usually is a GZIP-compressed CPIO archive. Usage: ===== You can either feed the RPM file into rpmunpack via standard input, or give the file name on the command line. In the first case, the archive gets written to standard out, and in the second case the name of the output file gets constructed by appending ".cpio.gz" to the end of the archive name which is stored within the RPM file. Examples: rpmunpack < at.spm | gzip -d | cpio -idm This will decode the RPM file "at.spm", decompress it and extract all files with cpio, which are enclosed in the archive. rpmunpack at.spm Suppose that the package name "at-3.8.1-6" is encoded within the RPM file (you can check this package name by using the UNIX file command, BTW), rpmunpack will generate the output file "at-3.8.1-6.cpio.gz" from the source RPM file "at.spm". Copyright: ========= This program has been released into the public domain. You can do whatever you like with it. This includes modifying the source, redistributing it etc. However, this source code is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. The author cannot be held liable for any damage whatsoever produced by the intended or even incorrect use of any part of this source code, the resulting binary or any product generated by using and/or modifying these sources. Gero Kuhlmann