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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | FORMAT | MEDIA TYPE | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
deb(5) dpkg suite deb(5)
deb - Debian binary package format
filename.deb
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).
The file is an ar archive with a magic value of !<arch>. Only the
common ar archive format 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.
Each tar entry size inside a tar archive is limited to 11 ASCII octal
digits, allowing for up to 8 GiB tar entries.
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. It is a tar archive
containing the package control information, either not compressed
(supported since dpkg 1.17.6), or compressed 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 current 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.
Current
application/vnd.debian.binary-package
Deprecated
application/x-debian-package
application/x-deb
deb-old(5), dpkg-deb(1), deb-control(5).
This page is part of the dpkg (Debian Package Manager) project.
Information about the project can be found at
⟨https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/⟩. If you have a bug report for
this manual page, see
⟨http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=dpkg⟩. This page
was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨git://git.debian.org/git/dpkg/dpkg.git⟩ on 2017-07-05. If you dis‐
cover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or
you have corrections or improvements to the information in this
COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail
to man-pages@man7.org
1.18.15-3-ga2ef 1970-01-01 deb(5)
Pages that refer to this page: dpkg(1), dpkg-deb(1), dpkg-name(1), dpkg-split(1), dselect(1), deb-control(5), deb-old(5), deb-split(5), deb-version(5)