How to get cpio (gnu, rhel 4) to extract to a specified directory?

Reason is I want to make a tidy script instead of

cd /some/dir
cpio -whatever<somefile
cd -

There is nothing in GNU cpio to allow for this. This might be a little cleaner:

(cd /some/dir && cpio -whatever < /some/file)

Using the subshell parentheses will preserve the scripts current working directory and using && will ensure that the cpio extraction is only done if you successfully change directories to the target.