deb - Debian binary package format

The .deb format is the Debian binary package file format. It is understood
by dpkg 0.93.76 and later, and is generated by default by all versions of
dpkg since 1.2.0 and all i386/ELF versions since 1.1.1elf.

The format described here is used since Debian 0.93; details of the old
format are described in deb-old(5).

FORMAT

The file is an ar archive with a magic number of !<arch>.

The first member is named debian-binary and contains a series of lines,
separated by newlines. Currently only one line is present, the format
version number, 2.0 at the time this manual page was written. Programs
which read new-format archives should be prepared for the minor number to
be increased and new lines to be present, and should ignore these if this
is the case.

If the major number has changed, an incompatible change has been made and
the program should stop. If it has not, then the program should be able to
safely continue, unless it encounters an unexpected member in the archive
(except at the end), as described below.

The second required member is named control.tar.gz . It is a gzipped tar
archive containing the package control information, as a series of plain
files, of which the file control is mandatory and contains the core control
information. Please see the Debian Packaging Manual, section 2.2 for
details of these files. The control tarball may optionally contain an entry
for `.', the current directory.

The third, last required member is named data.tar.gz . It contains the
filesystem archive as a gzipped tar archive.

These members must occur in this exact order. Current implementations
should ignore any additional members after data.tar.gz. Further members may
be defined in the future, and (if possible) will be placed after these
three. Any additional members that may need to be inserted before
data.tar.gz and which should be safely ignored by older programs, will have
names starting with an underscore, `_'.

Those new members which won't be able to be safely ignored will be inserted
before data.tar.gz with names starting with something other than
underscores, or will (more likely) cause the major version number to be
increased.

SEE ALSO
deb-old(5), dpkg-deb(1), deb-control(5), Debian Packaging Manual.


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Index
NAME
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
FORMAT
SEE ALSO

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This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 13:57:44 GMT, October 23, 2002