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rpm2cpio(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | ARGUMENTS | EXIT STATUS | EXAMPLES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON 

RPM2CPIO(1)              General Commands Manual              RPM2CPIO(1)

NAME         top

       rpm2cpio - Extract cpio archive from RPM Package Manager (RPM)
       package

SYNOPSIS         top

       rpm2cpio PACKAGE_FILE

       rpm2cpio -

DESCRIPTION         top

       rpm2cpio converts the specified rpm package to a cpio(1) archive
       on the standard output.

       Note: the cpio(5) format cannot host individual files over 4GB in
       size, and so this tool is considered obsolete.  Use rpm2archive(1)
       instead.

ARGUMENTS         top

       PACKAGE_FILE
           A binary or source RPM package.

       If dash (-) is given as the argument, data is read from the
       standard input.

EXIT STATUS         top

       On success, 0 is returned, a nonzero failure code otherwise.

EXAMPLES         top

       rpm2cpio glint-1.0-1.i386.rpm | cpio -dium
           Extract glint-1.0-1.i386.rpm contents relative to current
           directory.

       cat glint-1.0-1.i386.rpm | rpm2cpio - | cpio -tv
           View glint-1.0-1.i386.rpm file list with cpio(1).

SEE ALSO         top

       cpio(1), rpm(8), rpm2archive(1)

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the rpm (RPM Package Manager) project.
       Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm⟩.  It is not known
       how to report bugs for this man page; if you know, please send a
       mail to man-pages@man7.org.  This page was obtained from the
       project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm.git⟩ on
       2026-01-16.  (At that time, the date of the most recent commit
       that was found in the repository was 2026-01-15.)  If you discover
       any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
       believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page,
       or you have corrections or improvements to the information in this
       COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a
       mail to man-pages@man7.org

RPM 6.0.90                      2026-01-16                    RPM2CPIO(1)

Pages that refer to this page: rpm2archive(1),  rpmbuild(1),  rpm(8)

HTML rendering created 2026-01-16 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface.

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