How to extract RPM or DEB packages
RPM and DEB packages are both containers for other files. An RPM is some sort of cpio archive. On the other hand, a DEB file is a pure ar archive. So, it should be possible to unpack their contents using standard archiving tools, regardless of your distribution’s package format. Under normal conditions, you should use your distribution’s standard package manager, rpm or dpkg and their frontends, to manage those files. But, if you need to be more generic, here is how to do it.
RPM
For RPMs you need two command line utilities, rpm2cpio and cpio. Extracting the contents of the RPM package is a one step process:
rpm2cpio mypackage.rpm | cpio -vid
If you just need to list the contents of the package without extracting them, use the following:
rpm2cpio mypackage.rpm | cpio -vt
The -v option is used in order to get verbose output to the stdout. If you don’t need it, you can safely omit this switch. For more information about the cpio options, please refer to the cpio(1) manual page.
DEB
DEB files are ar archives, which contain three files:
- debian-binary
- control.tar.gz
- data.tar.gz
As you might have already guessed, the needed archived files exist in data.tar.gz. It is also obvious that unpacking this file is a two-step process.
First, extract the aforementioned three files from the DEB file (ar archive):
ar vx mypackage.deb
Then extract the contents of data.tar.gz using tar:
tar -xzvf data.tar.gz
Or, if you just need to get a listing of the files:
tar -tzvf data.tar.gz
Again the -v option in both ar and tar is used in order to get verbose output. It is safe not to use it. For more information, read the man pages: tar(1) and ar(1).
If anyone knows a one step process to extract the contents of the data.tar.gz, I’d be very interested in it!
Update
As Jon suggested in the comment area, the contents of data.tar.gz can be extracted from the DEB package in a one step process as shown below:
ar p mypackage.deb data.tar.gz | tar zx
That will do it.
The How to extract RPM or DEB packages by George Notaras, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
May 2nd, 2008 at 11:46 am
Please also try these:
‘rpm -qpvl package.rpm’
‘rpm -qpvl package.rpm > textfile’
‘less package.rpm’
‘lesspipe… > textfile’
‘less package.deb’
‘lesspipe… package.deb > textfile’
And of course The Midtnight Commander ‘mc’ will open both rpm and deb.
Rgds
February 1st, 2009 at 7:53 pm
One-liner to extract data.tar.gz:
ar p package.deb data.tar.gz|tar zx
February 3rd, 2009 at 3:19 pm
Jon: Excellent. Thanks for your feedback. I will update the post.
March 22nd, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Is there a GUI program to do all this that will take any package and convert it to what you want?
March 24th, 2009 at 2:47 am
None that I know of. There is a command line tool though, called alien, which can convert packages between the RPM and DEB formats. Its use is very straightforward. I highly recommend you give it a shot.
July 27th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
You can also extract deb files on Windows and Mac for free with AnyToISO program
August 18th, 2009 at 7:06 am
to extract RPM, I recommend p7z
May 9th, 2010 at 4:52 pm
The easiest way to extract a Debian package is with dpkg-deb. To extract the content run “dpkg-deb –extract mypackage.deb foobar”. If you want to modify the package:
dpkg-deb –extract mypackage.deb foobar
dpkg-deb -e mypackage.deb foobar/DEBIAN
modify files in foobar directory
dpkg-deb -b foobar
May 9th, 2010 at 6:07 pm
Hi Benjamin,
Having used RPM-based distributions, I was not aware that it was so easy to modify the contents of a DEB package and then repackage the modified files. Thanks for the tip!
As for the method of extracting the contents of RPM or DEB I describe in that post, it is meant to be a generic method without requiring any distribution specific tools, but generic archive managers.
I had decided to write it because I once needed to extract a DEB package under CentOS; I cannot recall why.
Thanks for stopping by.
August 18th, 2010 at 8:15 am
ar is rare to fine already installed. Please revise this to use dpkg-deb or at least show it as an option.
dpkg-deb -x
August 18th, 2010 at 12:18 pm
This article describes how to extract a DEB or RPM package using generic archive decompressors. The fact that utilities like rpm or dpkg are not used is intentional. Thanks
August 23rd, 2010 at 7:11 pm
“An one-step process” should be “a one step process.” This is because a/an is decided based on the pronunciation of the following word, not on the spelling. See: http://www.english-test.net/forum/ftopic31401.html
Thanks for the article :-).
August 23rd, 2010 at 10:22 pm
Hi Jonathan. Thanks for pointing it out! The same mistake probably exists in several posts throughout the web site.
It has been corrected in the current post. Thanks :-)
September 19th, 2011 at 10:22 am
good tutorial and very clear description and how to solve my problem. Thank for your tutorial. My problem about how to extract rpm file is solve :)
September 26th, 2011 at 10:11 am
It’s good to mention that ar is in binutils package.
September 28th, 2011 at 2:54 am
Hi and thanks for your feedback. The
binutilspackage is installed by default even in minimal installations on RHEL, Fedora, CentOS and Scientific Linux, so it was kind of impossible for this package to be missing. Also the following command reveals the containing RPM package:November 15th, 2011 at 2:58 pm
What is the use of :
debian-binary
control.tar.gz
in a .deb package. Dont we need to extract files in them too ?
January 16th, 2012 at 1:10 pm
Any way to convert .deb packages to .rpm and vice versa, without losing the post-install scripts?
March 5th, 2012 at 12:59 pm
@Benjamin, awesome!! That’s exactly what I was looking for. So I wanted to make few changes to the priority level in control file and your process is what I wanted.
Thanks @George Notaras for posting good stuff.
March 20th, 2012 at 12:18 am
Thanks, worked for me!
March 27th, 2012 at 12:27 am
just came in very handy, my dpkg and tar binaries were incompatible (dpkg calling tar with an unknown option), so I couldn’t use the famed dpkg-deb, I guess this is a good reason to have another way to unpack these things.
Got the tar.deb and unpacked it to get the newer tar binary, so my dpkg would work again.