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deb(5) Debian deb(5)
NAME
deb - Debian binary package format
SYNOPSIS
filename.deb
DESCRIPTION
The .deb format is the Debian binary package file format. It is understood since dpkg
0.93.76, and is generated by default since dpkg 1.2.0 and 1.1.1elf (i386/ELF builds).
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 value of !<arch>. Only the common ar archive for‐
mat is supported, with no long file name extensions, but with file names containing an
optional trailing slash, which limits their length to 15 characters (from the 16 allowed).
File sizes are limited to 10 ASCII decimal digits, allowing for up to approximately
9536.74 MiB member files.
The tar archives currently allowed are, the old-style (v7) format, the pre-POSIX ustar
format, a subset of the GNU format (only the new style long pathnames and long linknames,
supported since dpkg 1.4.1.17), and the POSIX ustar format (long names supported since
dpkg 1.15.0). Unrecognized tar typeflags are considered an error.
The first member is named debian-binary and contains a series of lines, separated by new‐
lines. 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. It is a tar archive containing the pack‐
age control information, either not compressed (supported since dpkg 1.17.6), or com‐
pressed with gzip (with .gz extension) or xz (with .xz extension, supported since 1.17.6),
as a series of plain files, of which the file control is mandatory and contains the core
control information. The control tarball may optionally contain an entry for `.', the cur‐
rent directory.
The third, last required member is named data.tar. It contains the filesystem as a tar
archive, either not compressed (supported since dpkg 1.10.24), or compressed with gzip
(with .gz extension), xz (with .xz extension, supported since dpkg 1.15.6), bzip2 (with
.bz2 extension, supported since dpkg 1.10.24) or lzma (with .lzma extension, supported
since dpkg 1.13.25).
These members must occur in this exact order. Current implementations should ignore any
additional members after data.tar. 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 after debian-binary and before control.tar or data.tar 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 with names starting with something other than underscores, or will (more likely)
cause the major version number to be increased.
MEDIA TYPE
Current
application/vnd.debian.binary-package
Deprecated
application/x-debian-package
application/x-deb
SEE ALSO
deb-old(5), dpkg-deb(1), deb-control(5).
Debian Project 2014-05-24 deb(5)
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