There are many reasons why forcing people to play their games through services like steam is wrong. But let’s save that for another day and get you playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim without connecting to steam.

You don’t need to install an RPM package just to get to the files. This can be especially useful if you’re looking for the default configuration files or docs from a package. You may have the package already installed and don’t want to reinstall it. It’s not pretty, and I wish rpm and yum provided a prettier method of extracting a file, but it works.

his little utility comes with rpm, so it’s already installed and waiting for you. rpm2cpio converts a rpm file specified as as a command argument (or as standard input) and spits it out as a cpio archive to standard output.

You can list the contents of an rpm without installing it first. If you’re not going to build your own from source, you should at least check an rpm before installing it to see what it’s going to install.

What if there’s no open file to be found, then what? If you were looking for some sort of media file, it might be easy to use a memory based distro with tools like photorec

I can’t figure out how to make yum ignore dependencies and I can’t find it by googling either. The yum-allowdowngrade package doesn’t do what I expected it to do. So I’ll just have to ignore yum for now and force rpm to do the job.