Extract package files from RPM

dnf & repoquery don’t provide ready faculties for extracting a file from a RPM package. You can do so without installing third-party software with rpm2cpio and cpio, which are distributed with Fedora Workstation & RHEL.

#!/bin/bash

dnf_extract() {
    pkg="${1?Must supply package name}"
    file="${2?Must supply file path}"
    tmpdir="$(mktemp -d)"
    mkdir -p "$tmpdir"
    (
        cd "$tmpdir" || exit 3
        pkgname=$(dnf download --downloadonly "$pkg" --destdir="$tmpdir" \
                      | tee >(grep -o '[^[:space:]]*.rpm') 1>&2)
        rpm2cpio "$pkgname" | cpio -icvd "*$file"
        cat "${file:1}"
    )
    rm -r "$tmpdir"
}

Which can be called with the package name and absolute file path:

$ dnf_extract bash-5.0.7-1.fc30.x86_64 /usr/share/licenses/bash/COPYING

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