On Wed, May 09, 2001 at 05:44:17PM -0500, Steve Langasek wrote: > On Wed, 9 May 2001, Timothy H. Keitt wrote: > > > Its been a while, but if I remember correctly, RPMs are in cpio format. > > $ cpio -idv -F gnocatan-client-0.6.1-2.alpha.rpm > cpio: warning: skipped 61098 bytes of junk > cpio: warning: archive header has reverse byte-order > cpio: [binary garbage output snipped]: unknown file type > cpio: premature end of file > > ... apparently not... exactly > RPMs are in fact based on the cpio format, but I think they stick their own > header on the front of the file -- the only way I've ever seen cpio handle the > contents of an RPM is after passing the RPM through the rpm2cpio utility. a few weeks ago i was chatting with a yellowdog employee who for some reason needed to extract a .rpm raw rather then via rpm. he could extract normal cpio files just fine, but no matter what could not get the rpm extracted. i kept telling him the `rpm is cpio' thing just isn't true but he still felt the need to fsck around with it and reread all the cpio docs for over an hour until he finally took my word for it and used rpm2cpio. based on cpio is a far cry from BEING a cpio archive. -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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