Oracle's stills tuck in the stone-age. CPIO was a data archiver designed to be used for storing data directly to tape. I guess Oracle has some staff that can't recognize it's 2009 since they still pack their Oracle installers using CPIO. Regardless, you may have come here looking for the way to do this. It's very simple:

1) Make sure you have the cpio command installed. If not, get it and build it directly from the birthplace of gnu, ftp://anonymous@prep.ai.mit.edu/gnu/cpio/cpio-2.9.tar.gz

1.5) OR ftp to prep.ai.mit.edu and login as anonymous, go to gnu/cpio and get the version you want.

1.6) OR download it with your package manager, e.g. YAST, aptitude, etc.

2) Uncompress the file using cpio:

cpio -idmv < file_name.cpio

Where file_name.cpio is the name of the file. It extracts, with verbose.

Have fun living in the past