Let’s say you’re on a computer where you don’t have administrative access, but you really need to use this one piece of software. In my case, this was Apple’s SF Symbols app. There’s a pretty simple way to extract the payload from the package (.PKG).
To get started, you first need two things. A macOS-equipped computer and a DMG with a PKG inside, or just a PKG. This tutorial will detail both.
Extracting the Package Contents
If your PKG is inside of a DMG, start here.
To extract the payload from a PKG inside of a DMG, we need to mount the DMG. There are two ways to do this. You can either use the Finder (double-click the DMG to mount it) or use the terminal with the following command: