pkgutil

Cross-platform reimplementation of Apple’s pkgutil (macOS), with a focus on making .pkg extraction work on other platforms.

Usage

Usage: pkgutil [OPTIONS] [COMMANDS] ...

Options:
  --help                 Show this usage guide
  --verbose, -v          Show contextual information and format for easy reading
  --force, -f            Perform all operations without asking for confirmation
  --include PATTERN      Only include paths matching PATTERN
  --exclude PATTERN      Exclude paths matching PATTERN
  --strip-components N   Strip N leading path components

File Commands:
  --expand PKG DIR       Write flat package entries to DIR
  --expand-full PKG DIR  Fully expand package contents to DIR

Limitations

Only extraction of .pkg is supported for the moment. Both for component packages and product archives.

Design choices

• Use libarchive as much as possible.
• Threat all .pkg XAR entries normally expect for well known nested archives like Payload and Scripts (only expanded in --expand-full)

libarchive pbzx support

Some Payload entries are wrapped in Apple’s pbzx. For this, we add pbzx support to libarchive as a patch for now, to deframe pbzx streams so the usual archive readers like cpio can parse the content.

Build

bazel build //:pkgutil

Example

bazel-bin/pkgutil --expand-full path/to/pkg.pkg outdir