Opening .pkg files on a Mac through Terminal?

Question

Bear with me here, but does anyone know how to use the Terminal program fairly well on Mac OSX? I need to open/extract a .pkg file with it, but I don't know how. Can anyone help?

Trust me, I simply need to use terminal. There's a whole 'nother thing goin' on there that won't let me open it, and as far as I can tell, Terminal is the safest and easiest way to get around that problem. I'd rather not go into detail as that would be quite a hassle, but trust me on this, I can't just open it.

Answer 1

First make a copy of the installer package and put it in a safe place.

In Terminal, navigate by CD command until you get to the file such as "installer.pkg" which is actually a directory so:
cd installer.pkg
ls (will show what's in it)
cd contents (could be the name of what's in it)
ls (to see what's in 'contents')
cd resources (or whatever is in 'contents')
ls (to see what's in 'resources' -- expect to eventually find a compressed archive, such as 'cool-app.pax.gz')
gunzip cool-app.pax.gz (will unzip it, making 'cool-app.pax')
mkdir foldername (to make a folder to hold the final extraction and keep it organized without the distraction of all the other files)
mv cool-app.pax foldername (will move 'cool-app.pax' to the new folder)
cd foldername
pax -r -f cool-app.pax (will extract the archive 'cool-app.pax')
ls (will show the files that were extracted)

Answer 2

You can download a free version of winrar here: http://bit.ly/1sMdIqr

Winrar is a very good program to unzip files and to decompress a bunch of other formats. You can use also 7zip or winzip for the same purpose but I believe that winrar is the best option. All these programs are very similar (you can compress/decompress files with a simple right click).

The great things is that winrar is free (you can download the trial version that never expires) and it can open all compressed formats: .zip, .rar, .7z / 7zip, .iso, .tar, .jar etc. (much more than the other programs).

That's why I strongly recommend Winrar

Answer 3

Why do it in the terminal? You can open a PKG just by double clicking on it. Want to see the contents? Just right click on it and choose Show Contents.

Answer 4

Hello,
I use Winrar and it works fine. I got it here http://bit.ly/1p3Pd1d
Winrar is the best freee software to open all the files, it works with all the extension like .zip, .rar, .iso, .tar, .bz2, .ace, .uue, .jar, .7z, etc..
I hope it helps