a macOS .pkg file – an xar archive file

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.pkg
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/xar_(archiver) – using xar is pretty similar to tar
• https://linux.die.net/man/1/xar

Inside the .pkg, you will find a file by the name *.pkg/Payload. That’s in fact a gzipped cpio file, so this will show you its content:

$ gzip -cd *.pkg/Payload | cpio -itv