Comments on: How to extract RPM or DEB packages

By: koofoos

koofoos — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 10:10:21 +0000

Any way to convert .deb packages to .rpm and vice versa, without losing the post-install scripts?

By: srm

srm — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 11:58:31 +0000

What is the use of :

debian-binary
control.tar.gz

in a .deb package. Dont we need to extract files in them too ?

By: George Notaras

George Notaras — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 23:54:33 +0000

Hi and thanks for your feedback. The binutils package 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:

yum provides /usr/bin/ar

By: Eruva

Eruva — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:11:28 +0000

It’s good to mention that ar is in binutils package.

By: toto

toto — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 07:22:48 +0000

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 :)

By: George Notaras

George Notaras — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 20:22:50 +0000

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 :-)

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 17:11:50 +0000

“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 :-).

By: George Notaras

George Notaras — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 10:18:11 +0000

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

By: asfd

asfd — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 06:15:42 +0000

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

By: George Notaras

George Notaras — Sun, 09 May 2010 16:07:54 +0000

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.