Linux Tips & Tricks

I'm hoping to use this article as a place to include small but useful Linux command line statements that have helped me lately.

To extract an RPM: 

 rpm2cpio ./package.rpm | cpio -idmv

Generate a custom CentOS installation disk.

I recently had to build a custom CentOS installation disk.  To do so I had to create a kickstart file and use this file to provide the answers to all of the potential questions that could arise during a manual installation.  This kickstart file can define essentially every aspect of the installation and allow the installation to proceed automatically.  After creating the kickstart file I had to rebuild the iso image.  Rebuilding the iso image involved using a very complicated statement that I'd like to document here:

genisoimage -u -r -v -T -J -joliet-long -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -eltorito -alt-boot -e images/efiboot.img -o ../new.iso .