screwed up rpm - how do I recover

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Sun, Aug 22, 2004 at 12:53:04PM -0400, sean darcy wrote:
> 
> rpm2cpio doesn't work, so I can't install using cpio.

Hm ...

> Is the a tool to extract rpm files that doesn't depend on rpm being 
> installed?

An rpm archive is really a header followed by an attached cpio
archive compressed with bzip2 or gzip.  So a simple way to extract
it is to search to a "magic" of a compressed blob and pipe bytes
from that moment on through an uncompressor and cpio.  A slightly
primitive, as a "magic signature" could be in theory found
accidentally earlier in a header, but in practice really effective.

Some years ago I wrote myself such extractor in literally few lines
of perl.  I am afraid that I do not know now where I stuck it if it
is still around.  I have seen also something like that done in bash.
Not very difficult.

  Michal