I’ve encountered a few scenarios of late where I couldn’t install an RPM package but needed its content. One is the security config at work where I have sudo access for cp but not install rights. Sigh! But more recently, I needed to compare a library from an updated package to the currently installed one. Listing package content confirms it is the same file name and path.

[root@fedora02 tmp]# rpm -q --filesbypkg -p ./mariadb-libs-10.2.13-2.fc27.i686.rpm
mariadb-libs              /etc/my.cnf.d/client.cnf
mariadb-libs              /usr/lib/.build-id
mariadb-libs              /usr/lib/.build-id/7c
mariadb-libs              /usr/lib/.build-id/7c/c8e65deafbdcc28b3089da60f295a6f757cf4f
mariadb-libs              /usr/lib/libmariadb.so.3

 

Extracting the rpm allowed me to actually compare the files, swap back and forth to see which worked, etc.

[lisa@fedora tmp]# rpm2cpio mariadb-libs-10.2.13-2.fc27.x86_64.rpm | cpio -idmv