I'm running cpio (GNU cpio) 2.13 on GNU/Linux (x86_64).

I have a CPIO file with these contents:

$ cpio -itv < ../xx.cpio
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root     root        33864 Apr 11  2021 ./usr/bin/xmlwf
drwxr-xr-x   1 root     root            0 Apr 11  2021 ./usr/lib/.build-id
drwxr-xr-x   1 root     root            0 Apr 11  2021 ./usr/lib/.build-id/3c
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           39 Apr 11  2021 ./usr/lib/.build-id/3c/f85ecb96e4abd4ca00f000970d1f8c89eb6753 -> ../../../../usr/lib64/libexpat.so.1.6.7
drwxr-xr-x   1 root     root            0 Apr 11  2021 ./usr/lib/.build-id/bb
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           25 Apr 11  2021 ./usr/lib/.build-id/bb/0390b9cc18e9a874ffed624b6ec25d5993ebb8 -> ../../../../usr/bin/xmlwf
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           17 Apr 11  2021 ./usr/lib64/libexpat.so.1 -> libexpat.so.1.6.7
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root     root       243992 Apr 11  2021 ./usr/lib64/libexpat.so.1.6.7
drwxr-xr-x   1 root     root            0 Apr 11  2021 ./usr/share/doc/expat
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root          142 Nov  1  2017 ./usr/share/doc/expat/AUTHORS
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root        28237 Nov  1  2017 ./usr/share/doc/expat/Changes
drwxr-xr-x   1 root     root            0 Apr 11  2021 ./usr/share/licenses/expat
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root         1144 Nov  1  2017 ./usr/share/licenses/expat/COPYING
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root         3785 Apr 11  2021 ./usr/share/man/man1/xmlwf.1.gz
613 blocks

When I try to extract it I get an error:

$ rm -rf usr && cpio -idmu --force-local --no-absolute-filenames --quiet < ../xx.cpio
cpio: ./usr/lib64/libexpat.so.1: Cannot open: No such file or directory

It turns out the problem is that the ./usr/lib64 directory does not exist, and the -d option does not compel cpio to create it when the thing to be created is a symlink (as libexpat.so.1 is).

If I pre-create the directory then it works:

$ rm -rf usr && mkdir -p usr/lib64 && cpio -idmu --force-local --no-absolute-filenames --quiet < ../xx.cpio

$ ls -l usr/lib64/
total 240
lrwxrwxrwx 1 pds pds     17 Aug 17 02:22 libexpat.so.1 -> libexpat.so.1.6.7*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pds pds 243992 Apr 11  2021 libexpat.so.1.6.7*

Using strace I can see that the symlink fails to create, then we don't try to run mkdir for it as we do when, for example, the actual shared library libexpat.so.1.6.7 file doesn't exist.