If '-' is given as argument, an rpm stream is read from standard in and written to standard out.
In opposite to rpm2cpio rpm2archive also works with RPM packages containing files greater than 4GB which are not supported by cpio. Unless rpm2cpio rpm2archive needs a working rpm installation which limits its usefulness for some disaster recovery scenarios.
rpm2archive glint-1.0-1.i386.rpm ; tar -xvz glint-1.0-1.i386.rpm.tgz
cat glint-1.0-1.i386.rpm | rpm2archive - | tar -tvz
Florian Festi <ffesti@redhat.com>