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 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 value of !<arch>.  Only the common ar archive format is supported, with no  long	file  name  exten-
       sions,  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 newlines. Currently only one line is present, the for-
       mat 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. 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  exten-
       sion, 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
       before 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.

SEE ALSO

       deb-old(5), dpkg-deb(1), deb-control(5).

Debian Project							    2012-06-16								    deb(5)