You need to pull one configuration file out of an .rpm package without installing the package. Which approach works?
LPIC-1 Exam 101-500, objective 102. Linux installation and package management medium
Machine-checked — no person has signed for it. This question was read against the source cited below by an automated pass, which found no contradiction. That is a weaker claim than it sounds: the same kind of process wrote the question, so it can confirm its own mistake.
Treat it as a good draft rather than as settled fact, and read the source below before you rely on it. It is not used in mock exams here — only questions a person has signed for are.
How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.
The options
Not correct rpm -i --nodeps package.rpm
Wrong. This still installs the package, merely skipping the dependency check — the opposite of leaving the system untouched.
Correct rpm2cpio package.rpm | cpio -idmv
Correct. rpm2cpio converts the RPM payload into a cpio archive on standard output; cpio -idmv then extracts it into the current directory, creating the directory structure as it goes.
Not correct rpm -qp package.rpm
Wrong. Querying a package file tells you about it — with -qlp you can list the files it contains — but query mode never extracts file contents.
Not correct rpm2cpio package.rpm > file.conf
Wrong. That just saves the whole cpio archive to a file named file.conf; the archive still has to be unpacked by cpio.
Why
An RPM is a header plus a compressed cpio archive of the payload. rpm2cpio writes that payload to standard output as cpio, which is why the idiom is a pipe into cpio (-i extract, -d create directories, -m preserve modification times, -v verbose). Paths come out relative to the current directory, so run it inside an empty scratch directory. 'rpm -qlp package.rpm' first tells you what is inside.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- LPI exam objective 102.5
- What it says
- Extract files from a package using rpm2cpio.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 102 and space the ones you get wrong.
More questions on this objective
- A mail server keeps filling its root filesystem because spooled mail and logs grow without bound, and when the disk fills the whole system becomes unusable. Which single change to the disk layout most directly contains that failure? machine-checked
- In LVM terminology, which object is created directly on a partition or whole disk so that its storage can be added to a pool? machine-checked
- You are laying out storage for a general-purpose Linux server. Which TWO of the following are genuine reasons to use LVM for the data filesystems rather than plain partitions? machine-checked
- Which file is the configuration file that GRUB 2 generates, and which administrators are told not to edit by hand on a typical Linux distribution? machine-checked
- You replaced the boot disk in a BIOS/MBR system and need to write the GRUB 2 boot loader into the master boot record of /dev/sda, installing the required GRUB modules under /boot. Which command does that? machine-checked
- On a GRUB 2 system whose configuration file is /boot/grub/grub.cfg, type the grub-mkconfig command — including the option and its argument — that regenerates that file. machine-checked